Facing Challenges : Feminism in Christian Higher Education and Other Places [1 ed.] 9781443877824, 9781443874625

Citation preview

Facing Challenges

Facing Challenges Feminism in Christian Higher Education and Other Places Edited by

Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen

Facing Challenges: Feminism in Christian Higher Education and Other Places Edited by Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Allyson Jule, Bettina Tate Pedersen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7462-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7462-5

This collection of essays is dedicated to our students who teach us much and to our colleagues in higher education and the church who have worked hard in creating environments in which the full flourishing of the entire Christian community can be nurtured.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................ xi Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist” Bettina Tate Pedersen Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University Holly Faith Nelson and Alethea Cook Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37 Man, What a Battle!: Facing the Problem of Language as a Feminist Theologian at a Conservative Christian University Kendra Weddle Irons Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 47 The Challenges of Teaching Feminist Philosophy at a Conservative Evangelical University: The Pedagogy of Indirection Robert Doede Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 61 Facing the Challenges of Teaching Gender and Education in a Christian Teacher Education Program Allyson Jule Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 73 Facing the Pedagogical Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom Priscilla Pope-Levison

viii

Table of Contents

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 89 “I Can’t Be Your Princess:” Facing the Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education Jeff Bolster Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 105 Inclusion or Exclusion?: Facing the Challenges of Women’s Voices in the Christian Community Rebecca Laird Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 117 Staying Together: Being a Feminist Church Leader without Coming to Pieces Janet Wootton Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 133 Facing the Outsider Within: Internationality, Feminism, and American Christian Higher Education Ivy George Contributors ............................................................................................. 147

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We most certainly could not have prepared such a wonderful collection of essays without the amazing dedication and commitment to excellence of the contributors themselves—both as writers and as active agents doing feminist work within various Christian contexts and communities. A collaboration of this kind rests on the coming together of so many regarding common themes, a coherence of ideas, and a shared vision of the importance of feminist scholarship. We are thankful for this group of writers and their valuable contributions. We also wish to thank, from the bottom of our hearts, the work of Cheryl Wall in formatting the manuscript and Julie Sutherland in reading through each chapter, with her expertise in feminist studies and her keen eye for clarity and consistencies. To the people at Cambridge Scholars Press, especially Sam Baker and Amanda Millar, we are deeply grateful. Their enthusiasm about our project and their eagerness to see the book come to fruition have meant the world to us throughout the process. To the family and friends involved in each contributor’s life, we extend a warm thank-you for the support you offer in a million little (and big) ways. Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen

INTRODUCTION ALLYSON JULE AND BETTINA TATE PEDERSEN

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, it might be reasonable to ask why another collection of essays on feminism would be needed. It is true that feminism is not a new development, and it is true that the effects of the feminist critiques in the past century have changed many things about our lives in Western society. It might also seem true that the answer to this query, coming from the wider context of secular society, might be significantly different from that deriving from a Christian context. While in some cases the answers are different, in many cases they are not. Further, as the differing political contexts across Western societies reveal, there are significant variances in what women can expect from different national contexts. The purpose in our collection is not to survey all the differing terrains of feminist efforts, successful or failed, across the breadth of US, Canadian, and UK societies; rather, we have chosen to focus on the Christian context in which we and our contributors live and work. Our focus is on the ways in which feminism continues to meet resistance from our Christian institutions and communities. The contexts addressed by the contributors here primarily include colleges, universities, and churches. Within these contexts, we describe the ongoing challenges we face as feminists with our students, with our colleagues, with our pastors, with our fellow congregants, with our peers, with our friends, with our families. We choose to frame these discussions as challenges we face rather than as balances we have achieved because the notion of balancing can suggest that we have reached a sort of happy equilibrium, and others may attain it as well. We also note that the idea of balancing, understood as “having it all,” has been critiqued and rejected by some feminists coming of age in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, who are responding to what they perceive as an excessive rejection from second-wave feminism of domains, activities, and roles more traditionally associated with femininity, and/or who believe that feminism means the freedom to reject a professional career outside the home and to choose the role of wife and mother exclusively. The frame of “facing” challenges rather than “balancing”

xii

Introduction

them also allows contributors to address the reality of token feminism in place of a transforming feminist vision and praxis within Christian institutions and communities. While we do acknowledge that feminist progress has been made over the course of our lifetimes, we also mean to suggest in gathering together the feminist voices in this collection that regardless of what wave of feminism with which contributors or readers align themselves, challenges to a feminist perspective, praxis, or critique persist. To our colleagues in secular institutions and communities this claim would seem too much of a truism to warrant the publication of another book on feminism. Within the context of Christian schools and churches, however, nothing about feminism, feminist critique, or feminist achievement should be easily passed off. Indeed, the vast majority of our students, colleagues, and peer worshippers have yet to engage even the most basic feminist questions or caricatures. Questions about what feminism actually is, questions about whether or not media stereotypes are accurate or are themselves a form of sexism, questions about feminist relationships, questions about feminist families and their values, questions about feminist content in university curriculum, questions about language used for God, questions about translations of the Bible that are more gender inclusive, questions about feminist pedagogy, and questions about the shared critiques of oppressive systems that feminism shares with other social justice critiques are some of the basic queries feminism makes. None of these questions have achieved widespread consideration, acceptance, or application within the churches, colleges, and universities from which we and our contributors come. At this point, it is worth noting that many would say that the primary question of our time is no longer feminism but rather sexuality. We agree that the question of human sexuality is indeed a central question, and we are hopeful that the growing witness of voices about the various expressions of human sexuality within the Christian community will continue to compel us to practice more hospitable welcomings and to initiate more open conversations about sexuality. We also believe that the lack of honest and hospitable engagement with those feminist questions that otherwise could have been probed for the past several decades underlies the very difficulty we currently experience in examining sexuality. Within the context of our grappling with the ongoing challenges of unasked and unresolved questions about feminism, all the contributors here have encountered and will continue to encounter the question of sexuality within our Christian institutions and churches.

Facing Challenges

xiii

This collection contains ten original articles, each connecting in some way with the challenges that feminist scholars face inside Christian higher education and in the Church itself. Included here are the voices of university professors, administrators, and church ministers. All the perspectives come from a long struggle with feminism’s place in traditional evangelical Christian universities and colleges and in Christian churches. The order in which these papers appear creates a trajectory that begins with scholarship on words and the power of language, moves to scholarship on teaching, pedagogy and student life on several Christian university campuses, proceeds to scholarship on the difficulties faced by ordained women ministers, and concludes with scholarship that discusses the intersections of feminism, post-colonial critique, and internationality in the context of American Christian higher education. In this way, the collection moves from grounding and foundational ideas necessary to do feminist work at all, but particularly in Christian institutions, to some specific geographical contexts where contributors have faced and analyzed definitive challenges. The collection opens with Bettina Tate Pedersen’s exploration of the importance of the use of the words “feminism” and “feminist” themselves within Christian universities and communities. With so many of today’s students distancing themselves from the feminist movement in general and its incarnation in the second wave of the 1960s and 1970s in particular, younger Christian writers have attempted to create post-feminist conversations in which they explore feminism without ever using the term and also in which they promote new concepts of femininity. Such conversations settle on if, why, or how feminism as a political movement is relevant today. This grappling continues to be experienced on Christian campuses. Pedersen’s insights into the still misunderstood necessity of feminism in Christian higher education points to the urgency of this collection. Next Holly Nelson and Alethea Cook’s chapter on third- and fourthwave feminism provides some necessary historical discussion about current iterations of feminism. Nelson and Cook consider how Christianity itself has a tenuous relationship with modern feminist ideas. They examine why Christians often fail to maintain the centrality of feminist ideas inside the Christian Gospel—that Good News is a liberation and completely aligned with the liberating forces of feminism. They achieve this without denying the disagreements that remain inside Christian circles regarding feminism and inside feminist circles regarding Christianity. This tension between secular feminists and evangelical Christians is the focus of their illuminating chapter.

xiv

Introduction

Kendra Wendle Irons’s chapter on the problem of language is a compelling discussion linking her personal experiences as a female professor in the theology department of a particularly conservative institution with the attitudes revealed about her presence on campus through critical language moments. In this chapter, she relates having being called a “feminazi” and being mocked in the college paper. Irons uses this individual experience to say something more universal about the persistent sexism that continues to dominate many institutions within the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) community. Her critique of places of Christian higher education unfolds into her hopeful and reasonable request for the CCCU to face the reality and harmful effects of the sexism that persists in their schools and to use their influence to raise awareness of and offer strategies for eliminating sexism in their campus communities. Robert Doede teaches philosophy at a Christian university. In his chapter, he writes about his pedagogy in a specific course that he has developed and continues to deliver: Feminist Philosophy. Doede locates himself within a journey of coming to a feminist consciousness through the study of philosophy itself. His use of the concept “pedagogy of indirection” provides a way forward regarding facing the challenge of delivering this course to students who live within traditional evangelical communities. Moreover, his experience begs the question of the importance of such a course in the curriculum of all Christian universities and colleges. Creating and delivering a feminist course is also the focus of Allyson Jule’s piece. Describing her university culture and the support that can be found from some administrators, Jule’s chapter introduces readers to the challenge she faces in encouraging a seemingly resistant culture to embrace the efforts of feminist scholars and to incorporate feminism into their own course material and teaching outcomes. She discusses her course, Gender and Education, as emerging from within such a community and, drawing on twenty-one questionnaires provided to her students, considers their experience with the course material. Her experience and course also foreground the critical importance of equipping our teachereducation students to positively deal with the students they will encounter in their own professional lives in matters of diversity regarding gender and sexual-orientation. Priscilla Pope-Levison also writes about her experiences as a professor of theology and provides suggestions for doing feminist work in such a setting and/or on such a subject matter. She offers some helpful steps for successfully facing discomfort with feminism, including getting to know

Facing Challenges

xv

one’s students, providing space in the class for students to identify their own worldview on the topic of feminism, and then telling stories—one’s own and, in particular, stories of other women of faith who have propelled Christian faith in significant ways, and in so doing serve as powerful examples to compel a reexamination of feminism’s place in Christian communities. Profiling two students enrolled in her class, Pope-Levison compares their views on feminism at the outset with those they offer as they gain growth and insight throughout the course. A look at how language that demeans women surfaces on a Christian college campus within the student body, how it may be used to undergird hazing practices and excuse harassment, and how it perpetuates insidious sexism even in a millennial generation is an important addition to this book’s exploration. Jeff Bolster, as Dean of Student Life on a Christian campus, has a unique insight into students’ understanding and behavior regarding gender roles. He writes of his own emerging feminist commitment and of how feminist theory and praxis has helped him shape his campus’s vision of student life, use emerging adulthood theory and bystander training to address issues of gender, and create more wholistic and affirming dorm culture, especially in the first-years men’s dorm. Both Rebecca Laird and Janet Wootton address the difficulties women clergy face in being fully recognized in the Church and in gaining the inclusion of women’s voices and women’s stories in the life and worship practices of the churches in which they have served. Laird’s context is North America and Wootton’s is Britain. Laird also addresses the devaluing and exclusion of women’s voices within Christian higher education, while Wootton explores the long tradition of struggle for women in church leadership and ministry. Both illustrate the connection modern church women have to the deep history of feminism. Ivy George writes of her experience as a Christian woman of colour from abroad teaching within Christian higher education in the United States. Her circumstances illustrate the complicated, messy, and often conflicting intersections of race, international culture, and Christian worldview produced by a national and cultural context outside of the West. Her essay also critiques a feminism that is little more than tokenism and calls for a deeper assessment of Western views of race, class, and capitalism that are produced in and by Christians in higher education. Though not focused on feminism exclusively, George’s essay illustrates well the ongoing need for engagement with feminism to keep its critique sharp and its inclusive vision ever widening to include the many marginalized people of our world.

xvi

Introduction

Returning to our choice of a framework, our emphasis on “facing” rather than “balancing” foregrounds the reality we all face as committed feminists within the global Christian church in raising feminist questions, making feminist critiques, experiencing the resistance to feminist paradigms and values, and implementing feminist pedagogies and/or worship practices. It is a reality that will persist in giving us challenges to face. Rather than succumbing to our inevitable discouragement, we hope to acknowledge for each other and for our readers that we are not alone in the feminist work that we do. We are not alone in facing feminist challenges. We are not alone in the difficulties those challenges bring into our lives. We are not alone in our need for renewed energy to face the challenges. We are not alone in our hope that although we live in the frustration of these challenges to feminism, we are moving incrementally closer to creating a global Christian community in which greater flourishing for women and men may occur.

CHAPTER ONE FACING WHY WE NEED THE WORDS “FEMINISM” AND “FEMINIST” BETTINA TATE PEDERSEN

A few years ago in my role as a Literature/Women’s Studies professor at a small Christian liberal arts university, I helped to organize a Gender Studies conference around the theme “Conversations toward Wholeness.” This theme was designed to facilitate a discussion about the position, progress, and possibilities for women in Christian higher education. The express focus of the conference, to my mind, was to raise the topic of gender within the context of Christian higher education, so it seemed appropriate to use the very words “feminism” and “feminist” in the conference title. While we on the steering committee did include the words themselves in the long list of prompts in the call for papers (“Male Allies, Feminist Men,” “Feminism and Christianity,” and “Feminist Theory, Theology and Praxis”), in my recollections of our planning meetings the words “feminist” and “feminism” were conspicuously absent from the ideas we discussed for a conference title. These words and their associations were carefully avoided or, when mentioned, seemed to close down dialogue. We chose instead to include many other topic descriptors that did not use these words. Not surprisingly, then, of the proposals submitted for consideration, only two of the approximately seventy proposals even used the words “feminist” or “feminism.” The way we danced around these words in our conference theme selection exemplifies the negotiations we make around these words in many domains. In my particular experience in Christian higher education, the words “feminism” and “feminist” tend to be conspicuously present or absent. Students and faculty either positively or negatively self-identify with the term: “I’m a feminist,” or “I’m not a feminist, but…”. Phrases such as “Women in Leadership,” “Wholeness,” “Women in Ministry,” “Chilly Climate,” or “Balancing” often supplant a direct use or reference to

2

Chapter One

feminism. These euphemistic phrases actually do a good job of keeping feminism and feminist issues effectively hidden, and this cover can function as an advantage or disadvantage. Sometimes it allows individuals to advance the work of a feminist critique under the radar, so to speak, with the clear aim of achieving it. Even though it is called something else, a feminist critique is effectively being negotiated rather than avoided. In contrast, this euphemistic cover works as a disadvantage when participants do not actually know that an oppressive set of circumstances for women (or any other identified group) is being addressed. An example of the kind of confused or mistaken understandings that can arise from a conflicted posturing around feminism occurred in a recent meeting of faculty leaders at my university. When the topic of climate was mentioned in the context of a conversation about diversity, one female colleague actually thought we were talking about the weather and not about workplaces that were hostile to women (or other marginalized groups). To be fair, her confusion might be attributed in part to the way the document in question had been worded. Still, the fact that we were using such indirect descriptions facilitated her confusion. In my view, the tendency to use euphemistic phrases, especially in Christian institutions, to describe or identify the sexist, racist, or homophobic practices that produce these “chilly climates” indicates how far we still have to go towards eradicating such practices. This proclivity to replace or avoid the words “feminist” or “feminism” strongly indicates both our lack of positive and committed engagement with feminism and our lack of understanding about what feminism and Christianity have in common. Whether such posturing arises out of fear, ignorance, stereotypical caricatures, or misinformation, it continues to be endemic to Christian higher education. Those of us in Christian contexts may assume that students in secular contexts have no problem identifying as feminists, but their identification with feminism has also shown the same distancing tendency as the “I’m not a feminist but…” we encounter in our religious colleges and universities. A PMLA special topics discussion on the state of feminism in the October 2006 issue and a speech as recent as Emma Watson’s 2014 address to the UN reveal this phenomenon in the past decade. This distancing is certainly part of the larger cultural conversation about postfeminism in general and popular culture especially, but I would argue that the causes for this in secular colleges and universities are significantly different from those in the Christian context. In secular academia, the discussion about feminism over the past three or four decades has been prominent and engaged. Further, it has been an expected part of the terrain

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

3

of the secular institution, and students appear to think that many of the aims of feminism have been effectively realized. Indeed, terms like “postfeminist,” receive fairly widespread discussion now, especially in popular culture studies. In Christian higher education, however, the expectation has been the opposite: frequent and direct discussion of feminism has been largely absent. In fact, if we were to use the number of Women’s or Gender Studies courses as a measure of how prominent the conversation has been in our institutions, we would have to conclude that it is small indeed. The number of such programs has hovered around the ten percent mark in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU)—only eleven or so member schools of the 1201 total actually have such programs on their campuses. In my experience and that of many of my colleagues from other CCCU institutions, when students in our schools claim that there is no longer any need for feminism, they are relying mostly on their knowledge of isolated examples of women in the media or on limited representations of a few notable women in their traditions or experience. They are not drawing their conclusions as a result of deep reading, careful analysis, or vigorous and fair-minded debate about feminist or post-feminist theory. In Christian higher education, we seem to proceed as if we all basically agree when it comes to a discourse or ideological position like feminism, and if we don’t agree, it’s better to be silent than to raise controversy. The tacit understandings we apparently share, however, are not unified. Views range from the position that feminism is incompatible with academic work at a Christian school, to the notion that everyone’s already on board with the basic aims of feminism, to the view that there really isn’t any need for a “feminist agenda” because women are equal already, to the belief that Christianity makes the need for such an emancipatory project unnecessary because we understand that men and women have different natures and roles in God’s design. Clearly, these positions are not in accord with one another, hovering uncertainly and often contradictorily between antifeminist and post-feminist discourses. We do not actually acknowledge our disagreement about feminism and a feminist praxis until an institutional policy, curricular issue, or a demeaning personal encounter compels us to directly confront our views. One particular perspective is perhaps the most common among college students in Christian colleges and universities, that view being that feminism and Christianity are antithetical. Melanie Springer Mock, Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Literature at George Fox University, a member school of the CCCU, commented on this view in her essay “Feminism in Peril: Contending with the F-Word” written for

4

Chapter One

Christian Feminism Today (the Evangelical & Ecumenical Women’s Caucus’s quarterly periodical) in 2007: Feminism has always been an F-word among many of my evangelical students and colleagues [… and] has never appeared to be in much jeopardy. Already having no status among most evangelicals, feminism would be unlikely to appear on a list of endangered ideologies in need of their protection. (Mock 2007, 1)

Faculty members, like Mock, who are among those who directly address feminism in their classes, often receive negative comments in student evaluations regarding the “feminist” quality of their courses; they are labelled as the one or two lone feminists in their departments or colleges and the comments negatively suggest these instructors have an agenda. They are “marked,” to use Deborah Tannen’s phrase (2006), as aberrant from the mainstream Christian culture. There may be a growing recognition, at least among some faculty at Christian universities in the CCCU, that views about feminism vary among Christians and that those views are often submerged in broader assumptions about gender equity in their own institution and communities. A recent study conducted by Samuel Joeckel and Thomas Chesnes, The Christian College Phenomenon (2012), offers some interesting data tracking some of the differing views. Joeckel and Chesnes’ study surveyed faculty and students at CCCU member schools on some broad questions about gender equity, among other matters. Allyson Jule and I analyzed the faculty data coming from that survey and found that the quantitative data in response to the questions on gender equity tended to show general satisfaction that gender equity was present in respondents’ schools; however, the qualitative data tended to reveal more dissatisfaction and ambivalence about the progressive state of gender equity with regard to theology and Biblical interpretation, academic freedom, campus or department climates, and personal feeling (Pedersen and Jule 2012). We concluded that one of the reasons for this discrepancy was the dearth of direct conversations (i.e. establishing university policies, designating feminist curriculum, addressing controversial issues in the classroom, creating gender/women’s studies programs, etc.) regarding gender and attendant feminist issues (Pedersen and Jule 2012). In my experience teaching in Christian higher education for the past fourteen years, I have seen a fairly steady stream of incoming students who have little understanding of or affinity with feminism, and a fairly steady stream of graduating students who persist in anti-feminist views through to commencement. While some of our students do become more

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

5

accurately informed about feminism as a result of their studies, the persistence of a shallow or inaccurate view of feminism in others may be partially attributed to students’ fear of feminism, which leads them to avoid classes or professors marked as feminist. This fear is to be expected given the caricatures of feminism in the media, especially via radical conservative media icons, and given the silence on gender and sexuality in evangelical churches—unless the topic is chastity. Our reluctance in Christian higher education to explicitly use these words, to unashamedly make feminist analysis and critique a part of our curriculum and pedagogies, and to do the work of feminist critique in examining our policies and worship practices is a major reason why a shallow and inadequate understanding of feminism persists. It is the space between both tacit views and informed views of feminism as an ideological and political position, on the one hand, and of feminists as actual people—not media stereotypes or caricatures, on the other hand, that I address in this essay. Tacit views are those primarily undergirded by fear, avoidance, and misinformation; whereas, informed views are supported by reading, study, and direct inquiry. It is my contention that we need the terms “feminism” and “feminist,” especially in our context of Christian higher education, for three key reasons: (1) they can elicit conversations about gender and women’s oppression that are missing in the evangelical Christian context; (2) they can introduce a theoreticallyinformed vocabulary for analyzing the complexity of ideas about, positions on, and commitments to gender—and by extension a lexicon for women’s oppression in the wider world; and (3) they can compel and equip a reasoned response to misconstrued definitions of feminism and caricatures of feminists.

Honest Conversations In my experience, some of the most honest conversations about feminism and being a feminist have arisen out of my own willingness to call myself a feminist, to publicly name a particular approach I take in a class discussion or lecture as a feminist, and/or to share what being a feminist means to and for me in my own experience as an academic, a professional woman, and a Christian.2 This self-identification has taken on a number of forms, from the fairly blatant to the more subtle. Examples include: x

posting a quote on my office door board that reads “I’ll be a postfeminist in the post-patriarchy”

Chapter One

6 x x x x x x x x x x

making a statement on the required use of inclusive language part of my syllabus whether or not my university or department adopts such a position assigning more women writers than many students are used to reading in a conscious effort to bring balance to the historical literary record and to my students’ reading experiences raising questions of feminist theoretical analysis in class discussion of texts whether the text is written by a woman or not directly exploring the various implications of differing feminist frames of analysis owning my feminist critical approach in some of my comments in class discussions participating as guest lecturer in other classes and extra-curricular forums dealing with feminism, gender, or sexuality discussing with students the gendered issues that arise in our school paper mentoring students who come to my office for personal issues surrounding gender, sexuality, feminism, and sometimes possible sexual harassment publishing on feminism and Christianity and sharing those works with my students answering direct (and sometimes personal) questions about my or my spouse’s feminist and Christian commitments.

All of these efforts taken together offer myriad opportunities for conversations with students in which they can openly ask questions, study texts, examine positions, learn history, and read arguments by feminists and about feminism that they would likely never engage in elsewhere. If they did engage in them elsewhere, that immersion might not occur in a context in which their Christian commitments would be taken seriously or be intimately understood. (These are also strategies that anyone can use or modify to better work with her or his own particular teaching style and pedagogical approach.) Some of my students have told me they have engaged feminism because of these very strategies of self-identification, and some of their anecdotes will be the best evidence I can offer here for why I believe it is so important to use these words. Much of this feedback comes in face-to-face conversations that students have with me after class. One I remember most vividly was with a very bright male student in one of my General Education literature classes. I had designed that course entirely around women novelists, and I had made the argument in my inaugural lecture that women were the individuals most responsible for the development and flourishing of the novel as a literary form. I was also able to pair nineteenth-century women

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

7

novelists with twentieth-century women to give added relevance and persistence to the questions that these women writers were raising in their fiction. Of course, the novels lent themselves well to the discussion of many of the standard questions of feminist analysis; thus, we had many opportunities to discuss issues of feminist inquiry in our class sessions. After the conclusion of the final exam, this young man stayed behind to tell me that he had come into the course with some apprehensions about me being a feminist and what that would mean for him, but after taking the course—reading the novels and discussing them with me and the forty or so other students in the class—he had completely reevaluated what he thought a feminist was and what he thought of feminism. Another young woman, whom I first met in another General Education course and who became a student I mentored during her college years and beyond, emailed me after a talk I gave on campus about feminism and Christianity: I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed (and was challenged, encouraged and inspired!) by your talk today. There is no doubt in my mind that your words will be used for God’s good purposes […] or, rather, will CONTINUE to be used, since your words have already helped me many times to seek and understand God’s purposes in my life. I couldn’t help but relate to what you said about living the tension between despair and commitment; and once again, your humility and hope in articulating the convictions of feminist Christianity (or Christian feminism) both teaches and encourages me. I only hope every person in that room today was open enough to hear the wisdom you shared and realize the gift you are to this community. So, for all those reasons, and many more, thank you for sharing your journey.

Another young woman who has maintained contact with me after her graduation and into the first years of her marriage recently wrote to tell me that having grown up in a family where her mother held a steady job and her church youth pastor was a woman, she “didn’t see how feminism was still important.” She went on to say, “Yet, when I attended college, I became acquainted with women’s stories that differed from my own, and I saw how sensitive gender issues really are.” She related how she and her husband were now “caught by the fact” that their new church taught it was “in accordance with God’s created order” that women not preach or become elders, and the two of them were shocked to discover that “gender roles was a new topic to some of [their small] group members.” She related her discouragement over Douglas Wilson’s book, Reforming Marriage, chosen by their small group for study and the way she combated that discouragement:

8

Chapter One While this book spurred on great discussion, I felt stifled by its teaching that women are purely their husbands’ helpers […] I was grateful for feminism to remind me that I am an individual who is free to define being a wife for herself. I was reminded that I too am called by God, not just my husband. I cringe to think of how many women have a gift for preaching and are not encouraged to use it because of their gender. Because of this, I see a need for feminism for young Christian women—it encourages them to challenge their beliefs about themselves, about others, and about God. And learning these things at a young age hopefully allows them to formulate their thoughts on these issues before making life-changing decisions.”

Her comments illustrate some of the ways in which women are held back from more egalitarian understandings of marriage and from using their gifts and skills within some Christian communities. This young woman was not hostile towards marriage and family, nor was she hostile to education. Indeed her college education had equipped her with knowledge and skills that she had worked hard to develop and was prepared to use in the workaday world. Her comments arose from within the context of her marriage as it was being defined by the particular Christian community she had joined during the early years of her married life. What she sought was an understanding of marriage, within her Christian community, that would allow for mutuality and for the full use of both partners’ unique skills and preparation for service in the church and in the everyday world. Comments such as hers offer some of the best critique of current American criticisms of feminism as too radical and ineffective because of an alleged hostility toward marriage and family. These kinds of critiques often find play in more popular than scholarly venues. Christine Hoff Sommers’ 2008 article “Feminism and Freedom” in The American Spectator is one such critique. Sommers draws a distinction between what she calls “conservative feminism” which is not hostile to marriage or family and “egalitarian feminism” which is. She contends that “conservative feminism” has been the more successful means of women’s widening enfranchisement historically and is the position offering the most promise for women today (Sommers 2008). Sommers comes at her critique of feminism largely from the position of a conservative secular scholar and expresses scant understanding of the confining terrains women currently experience in some Christian communities. Her distinction between conservative and egalitarian feminism is well-known among Christian feminist scholars who routinely address the “complementarian” and “egalitarian” views of women and men in light of Biblical scripture and gender roles in the church and in family and relational life. Indeed two well-established organizations, Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) and

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

9

Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus-Christian Feminism Today (EEWC-CFT), have been very active for decades in holding national and international conferences and supporting published work on these views of gender.3 Complementarians proceed from the essentialist point of view that there are God-ordained differences in the natures of women and men, and these gender differences complement one another. Complementarians work to reify these essential or so-called natural distinctions. Their project seeks to extend the complementarian view to its logical expression, limiting women to roles and positions more in keeping with worn platitudes that women are more nurturing and helping and men are more adventuresome and conquering—the very limitation that my former student was chafing against in her church community as a newly married woman. Sommers uses “modern social science—and evidence of everyday life [noting that w]omen are numerically dominant in the helping professions; [and] men prevail in the saving and rescuing vocations such as policemen, firefighters, and soldiers” (2008, 61) to support her argument that conservative feminism is the better or more effective form of feminism, but her argument falls flat in addressing the very real limitations and erasures that many women in church communities face in the name of such a conservative or complementarian view of gender. Further, Sommers’ criticism in “Feminism and Freedom” rings hollow when she extolls 1940s Clare Booth Luce, whom Sommers labels as a conservative feminist for her “exemplary remarks on Mother Nature and sex difference [that] are especially relevant today” (Sommers 2008). Sommers is relying on Luce to make the point that nature is clear on sex difference and the attendant pursuits that should follow from nature’s dictates: It is time to leave the question of the role of women in society up to Mother Nature—a difficult lady to fool. You have only to give women the same opportunities as men, and you will soon find out what is or is not in their nature. What is in women’s nature to do they will do, and you won’t be able to stop them. But you will also find, and so will they, that what is not in their nature, even if they are given every opportunity, they will not do, and you won’t be able to make them do it. (Sommers 2008)

The argument both Sommers and Luce invoke here with regard to nature is essentialist but more in the service of explaining why women want to be conservative (or in the Christian context, complementarian) feminists as opposed to egalitarian feminists. What is interesting about Sommers’ approach here is not its novelty but rather its failure to understand or clearly represent the philosophical

10

Chapter One

grounding of her argument in essentialism and its contrast to a statement made by John Stuart Mill in 1869. Mill outlines the same terrain delimiting nature and women’s behaviour, but to very different ends. His view is simply that nurture, environment, or social construction has been an insidious and potent shaper of anything we might venture to call “nature.” While Mill’s statement is strikingly similar to Luce’s, Mill is trying to advance the idea that we should take care, philosophically speaking, when grounding arguments in an appeal to “nature” since it is virtually impossible to say what nature is in any soundly purist sense: Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. (Mill 2006)

Further, Mill uses the so-called logic of nature in an inverse way to Luce and to Sommers when he writes in Subjection, one thing we may be certain of—that what is contrary to women’s nature to do, they never will be made to do by simple giving their nature free play. The anxiety of mankind [and in the case of Sommers and Luce we must add “womankind”] to interfere in behalf of nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing (2006).

Though Mill’s writing is nearly 150 years removed from our own time, it is appropriate to cite him in view of Sommers’ claim that modern feminism has erased history. On the contrary, the contentions at the heart of modern debates about feminism—conservative or egalitarian—arise from a very old historical terrain indeed, and one that acknowledged the philosophical validity of constructivist positions long before Luce or Sommers sought to discount them. One of the longest and most self-reflective email letters I have ever received came from an upper division male student who was responding to

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

11

some of my work that eventually went into Jule’s and my 2006 book, Being Feminist, Being Christian. He talked about the “fear” he had in using the term “feminist” and “feminism” as stemming mostly from his “lack of education about feminism” which he said “perpetuated two things: my ignorance about it and my fear of being involved in conflicts consisting of over-zealous talk, which might unduly distance me from my peers.” He went on to say that “I was also preventing myself from acquiring the proper tools or framework necessary to articulate any stance.” Perhaps the most significant thing he related was this: “What troubles me now is that I have missed the chance in class at [university] to discuss it openly and knowledgably.” These anecdotes illustrate that for some of our students our selfidentification as feminists is crucial to creating honest conversation. It is vital for provoking deep spiritual and intellectual journeying and for facilitating careful, thoughtful reflection—at least when it comes to topics or issues or positions that would be identified as feminist. Along with our self-identification, our classroom spaces are ideal for making our feminist commitments plain, for living them out honestly, passionately, and humbly in front of students as we model interwoven academic and spiritual lives. They are optimal for affording our students an opportunity they may never get anywhere else to examine their understandings and images of feminism and feminists.

Informed Vocabulary The second reason I believe we need the terms “feminist” and “feminism” is for their connection to the rich history of and discourse on feminism. This connection can help us to understand the feminist work that predates ours; to articulate our own ideas, positions, and commitments regarding gender; to recognize the global world of women’s ongoing oppression; and to better understand the complexity of these domains in differing past, present, and future contexts. The role of historical developments and nuanced discourse in understanding and even defining feminism is illustrated in PMLA’s forum on the state of feminism published in their October 2006 issue. The forum aimed to identify the success of feminism, the challenges that its success has now engendered, the varied reasons why feminism still has much to offer those of us working in higher education, and the directions for productive future feminist work in academia and beyond. Susan Gubar, distinguished professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington and best known for her joint work with Sandra Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic, noted:

12

Chapter One Feminist criticism, it can be argued, has been phenomenally successful within the humanities in general and literature departments in particular. Through its astonishingly rapid evolution during the last three decades of the twentieth century, feminist criticism moved from a critique of maledominated societal structures and disciplines to the recovery of female authors, from a reassessment of how we can conceptualize the cultural past in newly defined historical periods to an appreciation of the effect of gender on elite and popular genres. (Gubar 2006, 1712)

Gubar’s description identifies patriarchy in her “critique of maledominated societal structures.” She identifies recovery of or archival work on female authors, which includes: (1) the study of women’s literary history like that reflected upon by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, (2) the reconfiguration of standard literature anthologies, such as the Norton, to include a more accurate and representative sampling of women writers, (3) the publishing of new anthologies exclusively devoted to women writers to set alongside standard anthologies of a given literary period that would include only the writing of male writers, (4) the scholarship devoted to tracking and analyzing the erasure of prolific and esteemed women writers from anthologies of literature and from literary history itself, and (5) the reevaluation of genres deserving serious treatment and literary analysis, such as settlement literature, travel writing, journal writing, periodical prose, naturalist notebooks, children’s literature, devotional writing, and letter writing. Gubar identifies in her “effect of gender on elite and popular genres” the combination of feminist analysis with cultural studies in critiquing texts more broadly defined than literary prose, drama, or poetry, such as advertising, music lyrics and videos, television shows, films, journalism in all its venues, and the mass media. Sharon Marcus, another contributor to the PMLA forum, notes that “Feminist criticism has been successful enough to make its goals familiar ones that can be quickly summarized” though I would argue, not by many evangelical Christians inside or outside Christian higher education. The goals of feminist criticism summarized by Marcus are these: (1) Feminist criticism negates the status quo by questioning misogyny and other invidious gender distinctions and by analyzing constructions of femininity and masculinity. (2) Feminist criticism constructs definitions of gender that do not depend on female inferiority or male supremacy, expanding our sense of what women and men are, have been, and might become and asking what it might mean to be free of gender altogether.

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

13

(3) Feminist criticism attends to differences among women, often by being self-critical, and thus extends its purview not only to gender in general but to all inequalities that affect women or intersect with gender. (Marcus 2006, 1722)

Marcus’s summary of feminism’s goals reminds of us of several key terms: misogyny; gender and gender distinctions; constructions of femininity and masculinity (which connect directly with theorizing about essentialist or constructivist paradigms); male supremacy (a term which has been powerfully used by womanists of colour to critique the racism embedded in white, middle-class, Western feminism); male-identified and female-identified women; androgyny; gender performance theory; and difference as a theoretical concept that subverts and undoes notions of universal woman/hood. For Christian women, Marcus’s ponderings on gender bring St. Paul’s words to the Galatians to mind: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer enslaved or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).4 Astrid Henry (2006) reflects on feminist criticism’s ability to be self-critical, to turn its analytical lens on itself: The debates of the 1980s about difference in feminism also affected feminist literary theory, so that, as a result, it has become axiomatic today to point out that there is no one woman who can speak for all women, no category “Women” in which we can all gather as feminist, and no singular experience of gender, now or in the past. (1718)

These observations about feminist criticism’s success are not written with a general vocabulary but rather with the rich disciplinary knowledge and vocabulary that takes as understood all of the unspoken associations that I have delineated. It is this vocabulary and these associations that students do not know or understand as being connected to feminism. Very few of them will have been exposed to the depth of feminist thinking if all they have had to rely on is the mass media and their local churches. Their familiar phrase, “I’m not a feminist, but…” reveals their lack of knowledge about what feminism actually is. Many university students resist self-identifying as feminists on the one hand while fully supporting most of the basic tenets of (second and earlier wave) feminism on the other. “If asked directly,” observes Marcus of her secular university students, “most students would say that they are not feminist, yet most also respond in the affirmative if asked whether they hold positions associated with liberal feminism, such as women’s right to equal pay for equal work” (2006, 1723). In an email conversation, I asked one of our

14

Chapter One

student reporters why it was important to her to announce at the beginning of her article that she wasn’t a feminist. She answered, “Actually, I guess I could consider myself a feminist—but I don’t like to label myself because I always feel like I have to fit into that description later.” It was not at all clear to me what her label or description of feminism contained, nor was I certain that she knew herself. Students’ ignorance is a burden we academics must bear and address. We must show our students just how much feminist ground they are standing on as they live out their modern lives, how the legacy they have been given has come from the personal commitments and sacrifices of others, and how much more work there remains to be done for women worldwide.5 In short, there is a commitment required of this young woman journalist if she is to be a responsible citizen in the world, and we, her teachers, have a responsibility to help her see what that commitment may be or mean. As feminist academic Toril Moi observes, “if we—academic feminists—do not take up the challenge, can we be sure that others will?” (2006, 1739). To be sure, if we do not take up this challenge, ignorance will persist. More worrisome still, especially in the context of Christian higher education, is that some will take up the challenge of identifying and defining feminism and feminists with misinformation and caricature to extremely damaging ends. Perhaps even more important than students’ ignorance is the fear embedded in their resistance to identifying as feminists. This fear is connected to the damaging stereotypes and fearmongering that persist in many US cultural representations of feminists. Moi’s observations about her secular students at Duke illustrate this resistance and fear: Since the mid-1990s, I have noticed that most of my students no longer make feminism their central political personal project. At Duke I occasionally teach an undergraduate seminar called Feminist Classics. In the first session, I ask the students whether they consider themselves to be feminists. The answer is usually no. When I ask them if they are in favor of freedom, equality, and justice for women, the answer is always yes. “Doesn’t this mean that you are feminist after all?” I ask. The answer is usually, “Oh, well, if that’s all you mean by feminism, then we are feminists. But we would never call ourselves feminists.” When I ask why they wouldn’t, a long, involved discussion slowly reveals that on my liberal, privileged American campus, young women who would never put up with legal or institutional injustice believe that if they were to call themselves feminists, other people would think that they must be strident, domineering aggressive, and intolerant and—worst of all—that they must hate men. (Moi 2006, 1736)

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

15

These negative associations with feminism derive more from anecdotal and media portrayals of feminism and feminists than from academic study, and they are especially debilitating in the Christian community (churches, schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries), as some of my earlier anecdotes illustrate. Sadly, the student perspectives Moi relates line up with the same kind of resistance students in my classes have also related. These misguided understandings of feminism, from both secular and religious school students, reveal an insular position of race, geographic, and class privilege much more than they uncover a correct understanding of feminism or the need for it in the wider world. A similar position of having class privilege and access to education is characteristic of some post-feminist, girlie, or third-wave feminist debates as well. Carisa Showden’s helpful survey of these three iterations of feminism (all following second-wave feminism) maintains a clear distinction between post-feminism—the view of feminism as having already accomplished its aims for women—and girlie or third-wave feminism, which she understands to reject the seriousness and political activism of second-wave feminism (Showden 2009). Showden sees these new feminisms as lacking an accurate sense of feminism’s history and aims (especially those of second-wave feminism) and as having not yet articulated their own political aims very precisely (Showden 2009). Anita Harris writes more optimistically of the potential of third-wave feminism. She notes that young women do have an appreciation of the “good things” second-wave feminism has achieved, and they struggle with an “‘individualist feminism’ […] with the problematic of choice at its heart” (Harris 2010, 476). She cites numerous feminist studies that see the involvements of young women across a wide spectrum of issues and platforms as a feminism that is linked to social justice and hopes that a better articulation of this reality will help to overcome a “generationalism” and to forge a new feminist politics (Harris 2010). Both Showden’s and Harris’s observations are especially important in the context of Christian higher education. Most of our students have a post-feminist view believing feminism to be no longer necessary, while at the same time having a strong affinity with the values of and need for social justice. When students begin to study feminism in a wider context than just their own immediate knowledge or position, they become aware of the many complex issues that are bound up in questions of women’s lives and situations—issues such as poverty, access to education, access to proper health care for reproductive choice and for raising children, rape, pornography, media, language for women, and language for God, to name

16

Chapter One

just a few. In her book, Jesus Feminist, Sarah Bessey works to connect these issues and feminism for evangelical Christians: “Many of the seminal social issues of our time—poverty, lack of education, human trafficking, war and torture, domestic abuse—can track their way to our theology of, or beliefs about, women, which has its roots in what we believe about the nature, purpose, and character of God” (169, 2013). As Bessey knows, a serious study of women’s position worldwide will reveal both the need for feminism and feminism’s longstanding discourse on these complex issues. In turn, we can gain an informed theoretical understanding and praxis for addressing these issues in the world.

Reasoned Response For those threatened by the change in belief and action that a fuller knowledge of feminism brings, fear has been a powerful weapon and the basis upon which influential cultural figures have constructed and advanced extremist definitions of feminism, now taken as commonplace. If students or others do not know the history of feminism, they are easily led to fear extremist caricatures. Particularly in a Christian context, connections between feminism and activities or beliefs deemed sinful can be extremely effective in shutting down even the most basic investigation of feminism. Though writing from a secular context, Moi notes the power of extremist caricatures of feminism by reminding us that “[i]n 1992 Pat Robertson infamously declared, ‘The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians’” (Moi 2006, 1736). Moi also points to Rush Limbaugh’s statement that equates feminists with Nazis—Limbaugh claims: I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. [A friend of mine] coined the term to describe any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. I often use it to describe women who are obsessed with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust: abortion […]. A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren’t necessary. (quoted in Moi 2006, 1736)

It is not difficult to see the extremism expressed in the statements of these two men, nor is it difficult to acknowledge the fear of feminism such

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

17

statements would engender in evangelical Christians who have no other source of information about feminism or feminists upon which to draw. As Springer Mock notes of her evangelical Christian students: the students seem to fear the stigma attached to the word feminism, so that—at least on my evangelical Christian college campus—feminism is its own kind of “F” word, a word forbidden, vile, used as a term of disparagement (as in, “she’s such a feminist,” said in a tone suggesting that being a feminist puts someone on equal standing with a devil-worshipper or with Satan himself or herself). (2007, 1)

Moi’s analysis of the effects of statements like the ones Mock highlights shows us their effectiveness in shutting off association with feminism and feminists, but also points to the necessity of providing examples—in our own self-identification as feminists—that challenge such extremist caricatures. Moi isolates three points which she argues have “become virtual commonplaces” (2006, 1737) in general thinking about feminism: (1) feminists hate men and consider all women innocent victims of evil male power; (2) feminists are particularly dogmatic, inflexible, intolerant and incapable of questioning their own assumptions; and (3) since every sensible person is in favor of equality and justice for women, feminists are a bunch of fanatics, a lunatic fringe, an extremist, power-hungry minority whose ideas do not merit serious assessment. (2006, 1737)

If we look at each of these three commonplaces, we can see the overreaching claims each represents, and we can probably think of several exceptions to each by drawing on our own personal experience with feminism and feminists. Certainly there are extremist representations in most ideologically motivated groups, but to characterize all feminists and feminism itself in these ways is simply wrongheaded, if not malicious. Even as recently as 2014, in her speech to the UN advocating for the eradication of sexism worldwide, Emma Watson addressed the “manhating” stereotype saying, “this has to stop” (Watson 2014).6 In her reference it was unclear if she meant the stereotype or the hating, but either way, the fact that she addressed the notion at all indicates the persistent power of the stereotype. That these caricatures have become commonplace is the reality we must counteract by the examples of our own committed feminist lives, which are not accurately characterized by these extremes.

18

Chapter One

It no doubt seems that this work is unending. We are fighting the power of the mass media and its residual staying power, and we are fighting the power of ignorance in that these extremes are not systematically challenged by Christian higher education or the constituent churches that send students to our schools. Therefore, it is incumbent on us not to shy away from these terms in order to protect ourselves from being tainted with these extremist caricatures, but rather to address them head on and to exercise what agency we do have to teach and to exemplify what a deeper and wider study of feminism will show. While this work may take the whole of our careers and thus lose any aura of freshness, it is important to remember that the new is not always what is needed. Jane Elliot, lecturer at the University of York, UK and scholar of contemporary feminism, reminds us: When we assume that familiar approaches can no longer serve as tools to dislodge the present, we demonstrate a continued affinity for the modern logic that equates the new, the interesting, and the valuable. In so doing, we sidestep the difficult realization that […] things stay true longer than they stay interesting. (Elliot 2006, 1701)

Her words resonate deeply with the truth of Christian discipleship and commitment. Our responsibility is to be faithful whether the work seems exciting and new or routine and difficult. The analytical processes of feminism turned on our world can reveal much of the brokenness our Christian faith calls us to heal. They can also cultivate our attentiveness to the subtle and insidious forms of sexism that rob both women and men of their full flourishing as children of God. Bessey asserts her commitment to fight sexist oppression this way: As long as women are being abused and raped, as long as I know girls are being denied life itself through selective abortion, abandonment, and abuse, as long as brave little girls in Afghanistan are attacked with acid for the crime of going to school, and until being a Christian is synonymous with doing something about these things, you can also call me a feminist. (2013, 171-72)

If we do not understand the importance of the role we have to play in claiming and influencing the terms “feminism” and “feminist,” then we will by default surrender that power and influence to others who may hold and advance disparaging views on feminism and women in turn. For these and many additional reasons, some of which will be addressed in this collection, you can call me a feminist too.

Facing Why We Need the Words “Feminism” and “Feminist”

19

Bibliography Bessey, Sarah. Jesus Feminist An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women. New York: Howard Books, 2013. Elliot, Jane. "The Currency of Feminist Theory." PMLA 121:5 (October 2006): 1697-1703. Gold, Victor Roland, Jr. Thomas L. Hoyt, Sharon H. Ringe, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, and Jr., Barbara A Withers Burton H. Throckmorton. The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gubar, Susan. “Feminism Inside Out.” PMLA 121:5 (October 2006): 1711-1716. Harris, Anita. "Mind the Gap: Attitudes and Emergent Feminist Politics since the Third Wave." December 2010. http://0-search.ebscohost.com. phineas.pointloma.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=5547513 2&site=ehost-live (accessed June 19, 2014). Henry, Astrid. "Feminist Deaths and Feminism Today." PMLA 121:5 (October 2006): 1717-1721. Marcus, Sharon. "Feminist Criticism: A Tale of Two Bodies." PMLA 121:5 (October 2006): 1722-1728. Mill, John Stuart. "The Subjection of Woman." In The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age, by Stephen Greenblatt, 106566. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Mock, Melanie Springer. "Feminism in Peril: Contending with the FWord." Christian Feminism Today, Fall 2007: 1-3. Moi, Toril. "‘I Am Not a Feminist, But...’: How Feminism Became the FWord." PMLA 121:5 (October 2006): 1735-1741. Pedersen, Bettina Tate, and Allyson Jule. "Are We Doomed? Why Christian Colleges and Universities Must Lead on the Issue of Gender Equity and Why They Don't." In The Christian College Phenomenon: Inside America's Fastest Growing Institutions of Higher Learning, edited by Samuel Joeckel and Thomas Chesnes, 253-70. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012. Showden, Carisa R. "What's Political about the New Feminisms?" Frontiers 30, no. 2 (2009): 166-98. Sommers, Christina Hoff. "Feminism and Freedom." The American Spectator, July/August 2008: 52-62. Tannen, Deborah. "There Is No Unmarked Woman." In Signs of Life in the U. S. A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, 499-503. Boston & New York: Bedford St. Martin's, 2006.

20

Chapter One

Watson, Emma. "Emma Watson: Gender Equality Is Your Issue Too." UN Women. September 20, 2014. http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2014/9/emma-watsongender-equality-is-your-issue-too (accessed December 1, 2014).

Notes 1

See the CCCU website at https://www.cccu.org/members_and_affiliates. Of course, these three identifiers do not encompass all the positions I occupy, but for the purposes of this section of the discussion, I will limit my focus to just these three. 3 See their websites for full presentation of the resources they offer: http://www.cbeinternational.org/, http://www.eewc.com/ 4 The New Testament version quoted is The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 5 This kind of a project is taken for granted as admirable when we think of other kinds of history—the founding of America, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of Fascism and Nazism in WWII, or the desegregation of American public education—but it is often overlooked when it comes to women’s history in the United States. 6 The text of that portion of Watson’s UN speech was as follows: “I was appointed six months ago and the more I have spoken about feminism the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop.” (Watson 2014) 2

CHAPTER TWO THIRD- AND FOURTH-WAVE FEMINISM(S) AND THE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY HOLLY FAITH NELSON AND ALETHEA COOK

How Did We Get Here? Christian Evangelicals and Secular Third-Wave Feminists Historically, teaching, or even speaking about, feminism in an evangelical North American church or Christian institution of higher learning was a daunting, and sometimes risky, task. Despite the fact that feminism, like abolitionism, had Christian roots, feminism came to represent for evangelicals the eroding and eventual undoing of their core beliefs and values. The evangelical Christian aversion to modern feminism also partially stemmed from the fact that many contemporary feminists saw, and still see, religion as the primary source of their oppression, hence their ongoing attempt to challenge religious social and, even more particularly, sexual mores. The evangelical church felt it had to resist the attack on its traditions and beliefs to survive—an understandable response to claims that Christianity was nothing more than a vehicle of patriarchal domination. In a recent interview, when reflecting on her history of activism, Gloria Steinem declared: “What I should have been more in an uproar about is monotheism and religion […] I mean, religion is, too often, politics you’re not supposed to talk about” (qtd. in Stan, 2013, para. 25). The self-identified “feminist and trade union activist” Cath Elliott (2008) is more direct in her rejection of Christianity and other religions, insisting, like many earlier and contemporary secular feminists, on the profound divide between the feminist cause and Christian values: Christianity is and always has been antithetical to women’s freedom and equality, but it’s certainly not alone in this. Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing

22

Chapter Two only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression. It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power. (para. 2)

The evangelical church’s response to such views has been consistently predictable: if feminists have no time for the church, the church and, by extension, many evangelical Christian colleges and universities, have little or no time for feminism.1 This tension between secular feminists and evangelical Christians led to the mutual drawing of a firm line in the sand that had significant ideological and linguistic repercussions. Ecclesiastical, theological, and pneumatic language was, for the most part, excised from feminist discourse: the right of women to define and use their bodies as they saw fit was the clarion call of the majority of feminists. Reproductive rights were the focus of this “bodytalk” in the second wave of feminism, while sexual identity and expression took centre stage in its third wave. For the Christian community, turned off by what it saw as the bawdy and disruptive body of feminism, the flesh (especially that of the female persuasion) remained something of an embarrassment. In Christian churches and post-secondary institutions, when the human body was mentioned, the discourses of guilt and containment often framed the conversation. The sexed and sexual body, in particular, is still often approached with a hermeneutic of anxiety and suspicion. On the campus of the Christian university at which we teach and learn, for example, the female body is not infrequently sexualized by male students and then criticized as the potent source of their unwanted libidinous feelings, to which letters to the editor of our student newspaper periodically attest. Unfortunately, this polarizing impulse led both camps to a disturbing cultural obsession with the female body, third-wave feminists often “idolizing” it but paradoxically valuing it within a context of what Ariel Levy (2005) identified as essentially a male-defined “raunch culture” (7), and North American evangelical Christians erecting a fence around it, participating in what Jessica Valenti (2010) called “the cult of virginity” (17). Ironically, secular feminists of the late twentieth- and early twentyfirst centuries embraced a culture that defined “the stripper” as an emblem of feminist empowerment. The socio-economic reality of the majority of actual strippers and their role as sexual objects of the male gaze and commodities in mostly male-owned, frequently criminal, establishments were of little significance since they were imagined by third-wave feminists, as they had been and continue to be by many men, as figures of potent agency.2 In a similar vein, evangelical Christians embraced a culture that defined female virginity as the highest good, Protestants ironically returning to the medieval Catholic “cult of the Virgin,”

Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University

23

replacing the Virgin Mary with the everyday middle-class young woman. This fetishization of the sexed or unsexed female body in both camps based women’s value on the extent to which they guarded or displayed and made use of their sexual organs. It may appear on the surface that this polarization simply reinscribed the virgin/whore binary that surfaced, for example, in the writings of some of the Church Fathers, but this is not wholly the case. Most third-wave secular feminists believed that the ability of the average woman to express herself sexually, regardless of the method of expression, would complicate and eventually undermine this binary: a woman could be a productive and valued member of society by day and a “stripper” by night and retain her value. Likewise, for many Christians, the retention of a female’s virginity before marriage was not meant to negate her sexuality but to elevate it; her sexuality was not aligned with whorishness but with fecundity in marriage, and protecting her virginity until marriage allowed her to avoid being perceived and treated as a sex object by men. (Muslim women use similar reasoning to explain their sense of empowerment on wearing, for instance, the hijab.) However, while proponents of “raunch culture” and the “cult of virginity” may have attempted to challenge the virgin/whore binary by elevating female sexuality in radically different ways, both seemed to share an unhealthy obsession with the individual (un)sexed body. The dualist thinking that attempted to define women primarily in terms of their genitalia repeatedly distracted attention from the manner in which the body, mind and spirit operate together in women to facilitate their full or limited participation in society. This is not to argue that some attention to female sexual identity and expression is unwarranted, especially in light of ongoing societal attempts to regulate, limit, and often debase female bodies while ignoring the bodies and behaviours of their male counterparts. We do suggest however that the isolation and fetishization of this dimension of the female, consciously or not, restricted women’s identities and limited their agency. The obsession with the insular, (un)sexed “self” led to a solipsism that failed to attend to the collective reality of females outside the borders of the individual mind. Even as early as the late 1990s, the waning of “the women’s movement” was attributed to the “lip gloss and self-obsessed sexual solipsism” of young women who considered themselves third-wave feminists (Baumgardner and Richards, 2010, 92).3 The individualistic or personal impulse behind third-wave feminism was defended by R. Claire Snyder (2008), among others, who viewed it as a form of complex resistance to metanarrative and an acceptance of difference:

24

Chapter Two First, in response to the collapse of the category of “women”, the third wave foregrounds personal narratives that illustrate an intersectional and multiperspectival version of feminism. Second, as a consequence of the rise of postmodernism, thirdǦwavers embrace multivocality over synthesis and action over theoretical justification. Finally, in response to the divisiveness of the sex wars, thirdǦwave feminism emphasizes an inclusive and nonjudgmental approach that refuses to police the boundaries of the feminist political. In other words, thirdǦwave feminism rejects grand narratives for a feminism that operates as a hermeneutics of critique within a wide array of discursive locations, and replaces attempts at unity with a dynamic and welcoming politics of coalition. (175-76)

Snyder is correct that the third wave of feminism encouraged the foregrounding of the distinct experience of particular females, and she accurately highlights its benefits. However, she also recognizes that its role as a “hermeneutics of critique” rather than a “grand narrative” means that, like many postmodern movements, it is difficult for third-wave feminism to express itself as “collective action”, and it “may never be” able to manifest as “a social movement” (176, 193). In the evangelical Christian community, particularly in the United States, the focus in the homes of the most conservative on guarding and maintaining an individual girl’s virginity at all costs similarly distracts these young women from broader social, economic, and political concerns. At purity balls, for example, when receiving a purity ring from their father, girls are told some variation of the following: “This is just a reminder that keeping yourself pure is important. So you keep this on your finger and from this point you are married to the Lord and your father is your boyfriend” (Winter, 2014:para. 15). Apart from the rather disquieting conception of a girl’s father as her boyfriend, this ceremony compels an individual young woman to turn inward, absorbed with the notion that her own state of being (and her salvation) is constantly under threat from her potentially treacherous desires as well as the lustful desires of any boy with whom she comes into contact.4 To borrow the terminology of Charles Taylor (2008), if the third-wave feminist privileged the experiences of the individual “porous” female body that opened itself up to any desired sexual experience, the conservative evangelical promoted “buffering” and mastering the individual self in order to “disengag[e] from whatever is beyond the boundary” (para. 16). A concrete example of such buffering is evident in TLC’s television program, 19 Kids and Counting, in which the conservative evangelical Duggar children can only “side hug” the young men and women they court, the sides of their bodies serving as sufficient buffers to intimate contact.

Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University

25

Ironically, therefore, both secular third-wave feminism and conservative evangelical Christianity have in some instances led adherents to a similar place with respect to women: to the fetishization, even idolatry, of the female body; to a reduction of the female to her sexual parts; and to the privileging of personal and private embodied experience or lack thereof (Valenti, 2010, 215). We have thus far outlined what we see as gender-related challenges that have manifested over the past few decades in both secular feminist and Christian evangelical communities. In the remainder of this chapter we will discuss what both camps have to contribute to a more truly revolutionary fourth-wave feminism.

“Mind the Gap”: Bridging the Divide between Christian Evangelicals and Secular Third-Wave Feminists Despite the battle over the nature and appropriate behaviour of the female body, Christian evangelicals and secular third-wave feminists are not wholly at odds and both groups have made efforts to bridge the gap between spiritual and secular ways of theorizing woman, with the greatest potential occurring when sexuality is but one of the many issues related to women’s lives. There is some truth in Mandy Van Deven’s (2009) claim that “[o]ne distinctive feature of third wave feminism is the demand for society to remove all scripts—but the one script that persists among mainstream feminists is an antagonism toward religion” (para. 1). However, there are many secular feminists who remain interested in spirituality. While Gloria Steinem, for example, rejects monotheistic religion in the interview quoted above, she qualifies her statement in this way: “Spirituality is democratic and in each of us; it’s a different story” (qtd. in Stan, 2013, para. 25). As with Steinem, many third-wave feminists are more receptive to the notion of the spiritual than the religious. In her study of British third-wave feminists, Kristen Aune (2011) noted that while third-wave feminists are “significantly less religious” than “the general population”, they are “somewhat more spiritual,” though both “religion and spirituality […] remain on the margins of [their] feminist activism and scholarship” (33, 51). In her introduction to the collection Feminist Spirituality: The Next Generation, Chris A. Klassen (2009) associates third-wave feminism with “alternative” or “feminist spiritualties” (4). Obviously, such “alternative spiritualties” would be anathema to Christian evangelicals, but the recognition of the spiritual dimension and needs of women does, at least, move the dialogue into the metaphysical sphere.

26

Chapter Two

For their part, a surprising number of Christian evangelical women have been willing to bridge the gap between Christianity and feminism, helping to devise and define the term “Christian feminist,” and theorizing that by believing in the compete equality of men and women one is embracing the foundational tenet of feminism without compromising the central principles of the Christian faith. They routinely argue that feminism is rooted in, or bolstered by, the Christian faith, pointing, for example, to the seventeenth-century Quakers who argued that the “inner light” of the divine did not distinguish between its male and female hosts. Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed of by the Scriptures is an early example of what a number of feminists in the evangelical Church consider a proto-feminist text. Fell (1666) summarized her defence of women’s right to speak on spiritual matters thus: And so let this serve to stop that opposing Spirit that would limit the Power and Spirit of the Lord Jesus, whose Spirit is poured upon all Flesh, both Sons and Daughters, now in his Resurrection; and since that the Lord God in the Creation, when he made Man in his own Image, he made them Male and Female; and since that Christ Jesus, as the Apostle saith, was made of a Woman, and the Power of the Highest overshadowed her, and the Holy Ghost came upon her, and the Holy Thing that was born of her, was called the Son of God; and when he was upon the Earth, he manifested his Love, and his Will, and his Mind, both to the Woman of Samaria, and Martha, and Mary her Sister, and several others, as hath been shewed; and after his Resurrection also, manifested himself unto them first of all, even before he ascended unto his Father: Now when Jesus was risen, the first Day of the Week, he appeared first unto Mary Magdalene, Mark 16. 9. And thus the Lord Jesus hath manifested himself and his Power, without Respect of Persons; and so let all Mouths be stopt that would limit him, whose Power and Spirit is infinite, who is pouring it upon all Flesh. (para. 28)

Fell’s pamphlet is just one of a series of documents produced by Quakers and other early-modern Christian women that are cited in accounts of the lengthy pre-history of feminism. It is true that there are many within Christian evangelical circles who contend that “Christian feminism” is an oxymoron, and many secular feminists heartily agree.5 However, as Sarah Bessey’s (2013) recent book Jesus Feminist argues, even though “in some [Christian] circles, using the word feminist is the equivalent of an f-bomb dropped in church”, the central figure in Christianity, Jesus, came to cast off “injustice and oppression” and to bring about “equality and freedom” (12, 26). Patriarchy for Bessey, an evangelical, and other Christian feminists is just one form of oppression that was instituted as a consequence of the Fall from which

Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University

27

Jesus came to set humanity free. This reading of Scripture allows the Christian feminist, musician, and theologian Vicky Beeching (2014), among others, to confidently pronounce that “Jesus was a feminist: he shocked his peers with the counter-cultural, radical equality that he extended to the women around him. So I feel very comfortable aligning myself with a movement that represents his heartbeat for gender equality” (para. 15). A casual survey of published studies and of more informal literature on the internet suggests that there are perhaps more Christian feminists willing to consider how tenets of feminism accord with their religious worldview than there are secular third-wave feminists who are willing to consider the value of religious doctrine and spiritual practices. The Christian university, therefore, is a useful place to begin theorizing how to bridge the gap between Christian feminists (evangelical and otherwise) and third-wave secular feminists to achieve the long-held aim of feminism as it enters its fourth wave: the “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex” (“feminism,” OED).6

Fourth-Wave Feminism(s): Dwelling in Possibility7 When attempting to theorize a fourth-wave feminism that can include both religious and secular feminists, we must first recognize that we currently live in a time of transition for feminists of all persuasions. Many believe that there has been an awakening of sorts that has inspired a move away from solipsistic thinking and towards social justice initiatives in both religious and secular camps. This belief emphasizes both camps’ focus on “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40)—those without a voice—in communities across the globe, and their use of the immediacy and influence of new digital technologies to garner authority and advance advocacy efforts. In 2005, Pythea Peay, a theorist of women and spirituality, expressed her belief that a different form of feminism was taking shape, at the centre of which: lies a new kind of political activism that’s guided and sustained by spirituality. Some are calling it the long awaited “fourth wave” of feminism – a fusion of spirituality and social justice reminiscent of the American civil rights movement and Gandhi’s call for non-violent change. (para. 2)

Christian feminists would tend to agree with such a claim. While secular feminists generally do not conceive of the fourth wave in these terms, they share an interest in matters of social justice, using new technologies to

28

Chapter Two

forge a larger and more powerful collective, extending their geographical reach and influence to achieve their social, economic, and political ends. Ealasaid Munro (2013), a “feminist geographer”, wrote insightfully on the revitalization of feminism through digital culture, challenging proclamations on the death of feminism along the way: Whether or not we are living through a “fourth wave” of feminism, it is clear that women’s understanding of their position in the world and their political struggles is [sic] changing. With more and more young feminists turning to the internet, it is imperative that academics consider the effects that new technologies are having on feminist debate and activism […]. The political potential of the fourth wave centres around [sic] giving voice to those women still marginalised by the mainstream. (para. 14)

In her article for The Guardian, Kira Cochrane (2013), the author of Rebel Women: The Rise of the Fourth Wave of Feminism, voiced a similar conclusion about the role of technology in an emergent fourth-wave feminism: “It’s defined by technology: tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online” (para. 3). Digital tools help contemporary feminists to achieve their objective, which, she theorized, is “to elevate and make space for the voices and issues of those who are marginalised, and a framework for recognising how class, race, age, ability, sexuality, gender, and other issues combine to affect women’s experience of discrimination” (para. 17). Such feminists, she argued, often self-identify as “intersectional” inasmuch as they wish to address the complex and intersecting factors involved in the oppression of women throughout the world (para. 17). The nature and operation of digital culture, therefore, permits contemporary feminists and their allies to intervene immediately in the oppression of a single woman or group of women, as was seen in, for example, the #RealMenDontBuyGirls and #bringbackourgirls campaigns. Given a renewed interest in social justice and social activism, a greater understanding of the complex forces intersecting in the lives of women throughout the world, and women’s increasing ability to unite, advocate, and inspire change through new digital media, there is a sense that it might be possible for Christian feminists, evangelical or otherwise, and secular third-wave feminists, to collaborate on projects that improve the physical, psychological, intellectual, and perhaps even the spiritual (broadly defined) lives of females. In 1984, Audre Lorde suggested, in a publication on socio-economic, racial, sexual, and geographic differences among women, that diverse women must unite to generate a more powerful

Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University

29

feminist movement, though she did not name religion as a category of difference: Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters […]. As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. (111-12)

In quoting Lorde in defence of a Christian/secular feminist alliance, we are reading her work wholly against the grain and against her intention, since she would have associated orthodox religion with “the Master’s House” of patriarchy that must be dismantled. However, we would suggest that to ignore this category of difference is to fail to work with and meet the needs of a vast segment of women around the world. In 2012, it was reported in The Washington Times that, according to a “comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life […] there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84 percent of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion,” nearly one-third of whom are Christians, followed by Muslims (23 percent), Hindus (15 percent), and Buddhists (7 percent) (Harper, 2012: paras. 1-3).8 If we ignore the religious framework within which most women in the world operate and to which many are devoted, we will find it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out projects that address and meet their self-identified needs. Christian feminists could serve a particularly useful role in “translating” the spiritually-inflected needs of women to an organization in which religious and secular feminists work together to advance social justice projects that improve the lives of girls and women. As most women around the world are unlikely to abandon their faith commitment and embrace a secular Western feminism, which could be viewed as part of a neo-colonial agenda, a fourth-wave feminism that allowed for diverse spiritual or secular views focused on

30

Chapter Two

combating the oppression of vulnerable and victimized women and promoting gender equality would be more flexible, adapting to a range of circumstances as necessary.

Fourth-Wave Feminism(s): Facing Realities It may seem that such an alliance in which atheist, agnostic, and religious feminists work together for the greater good of females across the globe through digital media and boots on the ground is a pipe dream that cannot overcome a series of substantial obstacles. First, if most secular third-wave feminists, like their second-wave foremothers, believe religion is an obstacle to, rather than a potential vehicle for, female liberation and gender equality, then is it not impossible for them to work alongside a religious group? A Christian feminist would suggest that this need not be the case because, while it is true that many religions have been institutionalized in such a way as to silence or side-line women, they are, in fact, the majority in many religious institutions, frequently outnumbering men at business meetings in Christian evangelical churches, for example, where decisions are based on a majority vote. Further, as Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak (1996) showed, gender inequality that exists within the institution is often cognitively reframed and minimized by women, allowing them to take advantage of “[t]he power of connection and relationship, most essential to their own views of the faith experience […] in abundance” (17, 27).9 That is to say, even when religious institutions appear to support gender inequality according to “the letter of the law,” they do not of necessity function as such in practice, and women members often find themselves significantly empowered in religious communities by reading, say, their church, temple, or mosque through their own hermeneutic. In almost every institution that they join—secular or religious—women frequently engage in cognitive reorientation; therefore, membership in such an organization should not preclude them from being feminists in the broadest sense. The difference in the way that secular feminists and Christian evangelical feminists view the reproductive and sexual functions of the female body is perhaps the most significant obstacle to a fourth-wave feminism that includes both secular and Christian members. While, for example, Christian evangelicals are typically pro-life, the vast majority of contemporary secular feminists are pro-choice. Similarly, most Christian evangelicals view sex before marriage as immoral while contemporary secular feminists view sex before marriage as normal and healthy. These and other differences in opinion on both female and male sexuality as well

Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University

31

as reproductive options for women may prevent Christian evangelical and contemporary secular feminists from working together on projects directly related to such issues on which they fundamentally disagree. Christian feminist projects directed at, for example, selective abortion of female fetuses or prostitution/sex work have been viewed with suspicion by secular feminists who are concerned that this type of project is part of a religious “sexual counter-revolution” intent on surreptitiously undermining the professed gains for women achieved by the sexual revolution. A Christian/secular alliance could not work together on projects in which their views are wholly antithetical; however, there are a number of women’s issues on which both camps could agree, such as domestic violence, rape, women’s access to education, the wage gap between men and women, the glass ceiling in the workplace, the sex trafficking of children, and the feminization of poverty. While Christian and secular feminists may have different motives behind their interest in addressing these issues, the desired results are often close, if not identical. Although very little research has been conducted on the notion of a Christian/secular feminist coalition, particularly as a feature of fourth-wave feminism, an article published in 2007 considered the possibility of feminists across the religious/secular divide working together to improve women’s lives: Susan J. Stabile’s “Can Secular Feminists and Catholic Feminists Work Together to Ease the Conflict Between Work and Family?” In that study, which considers how secular and Catholic feminist legal theorists might unite in the interest of work/family balance for women, Stabile saw some promising potential: Catholic feminist legal theory and secular feminist legal theory share a concern about the failure of the workplace to accommodate family life. That shared interest allows for a mutual support of many proposals to restructure the workplace and to value work done in the home. However, there are clear divergences. The primacy of the traditional family in Catholic thought, combined with an acceptance of immutable differences between men and women, means that there will be points along this road where the paths of Catholic and secular feminist will part company. It is my hope that beginning the process of identifying the points of convergence and divergence will lead to a greater dialogue between Catholic and secular scholars that will allow each to grow so that each may contribute more fully to the building of a more just and humane society. (467)

In focusing on the “convergences” while acknowledging the “divergences,” a fourth-wave feminism could lead to feminists—who self-identify as atheists, agnostics, and religious—working together to establish, in

32

Chapter Two

Stabile’s terms, “a more just and humane society” (467), with an emphasis on the place and treatment of girls and women in that society. In order to achieve this end, we propose a bipartisan approach to the problem of the divergences between secular and Christian feminists.10 We first considered a “third way” political approach to transcending longstanding “antagonisms” between secular feminists and evangelical Christians, which is driven by the desire to “dissolve or bridge certain policy choices and values” of the political left and right (Bastow and Martin, 2003: 3). Dissolving or bridging opposing policies, beliefs, and practices, however, can entail a dubious “abandoning [of] a principled defence of one side of these oppositions over another,” a move that neither Christian nor secular feminists are likely to make (ibid.). In contrast, a bipartisan approach would involve temporarily and diplomatically setting aside fundamental differences and contentious issues in the interest of cooperating on women-centred projects on which both groups agree. This would mean that neither party would have to compromise or capitulate their foundational principles and values, or attempt to synthesize them in some way with their opposites, but it would allow “the women of the world,” regardless of secular or religious leaning, to be mobilized, which is “the fastest way to change society” according to the philosopher and human rights activist Charles Malik. In a recent speech, the actress Emma Watson, a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and representative of the HeforShe campaign, appealed to men to become actively involved in the movement for gender equality, stating, “gender equality is your issue too.”11 She argued that if fifty percent of the population is not invested in the feminist cause, its success is unlikely. While some criticized her speech for pandering to men (and by extension the patriarchal power structure), her earnest goal appeared to be the reconciliation of men and women in the interest of the higher values of unity, equality, and justice. If secular and religious feminists, like women and men, do not reconcile in some small way and discern how they might cooperate to improve the lives of women around the world, the mobilization of women will be hindered, their efforts diluted, and their energy more readily depleted. While proclaiming one’s own righteousness and rightness and “othering” feminists with whom we disagree on some issues might be a comfortable posture that minimizes the danger of crosspollination of principles and values, we should seriously consider what is lost or sacrificed in adopting this stance. .

Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University

33

Bibliography Aune, Kristin. “Much Less Religious, a Little More Spiritual: The Religious and Spiritual Views of Third-Wave Feminists in the UK.” Feminist Review 97 (2011): 32-55. Accessed September 9, 2014. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v97/n1/full/fr201033a. html. Bastow, Steve and James Martin. Third Way Discourse: European Ideologies in the Twentieth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. ManifestA: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010. Beeching, Vicky. “Christian Feminism is Not an Oxymoron.” Church Times, February 21, 2014. Accessed September 10, 2014. http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/21february/comment/opinion/christian-feminism-is-not-an-oxymoron. Bessey, Sarah. Jesus Feminist. New York: Howard Books, 2013. Cochrane, Kira. “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Meet the Rebel Women.” The Guardian, December 10, 2013. Accessed September 14, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wavefeminism-rebel-women. Elliott, Cath. “I’m Not Praying.” Comment is Free, The Guardian, August 19, 2008. Accessed June 30, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/comm entisfree/2008/aug/19/gender.religion. “Emma Watson to United Nations: I’m a Feminist.” CNN video clip, September 22, 2014. Accessed September 25, 2014. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9SUAcNlVQ4. Fell, Margaret. Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed of By Scriptures (London, 1666). Quaker Heritage Press. Accessed September 7, 2014. http://www.qhpress.org/texts/fell.html. “feminism, n.” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/69192?redirectedFrom=feminism. Accessed October 2, 2014. Harper, Jennifer. “84 percent of the world population has faith; a third are Christian.” Water Cooler Blog, The Washington Times, December 23, 2012. Accessed September 20, 2014. http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/dec/23/84percent-world-population-has-faith-third-are-ch/. Jeffreys, Sheila. “Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and the Reinforcement of Male Dominance.” Feminist Practices: Signs

34

Chapter Two

on the Syllabus (Digital Course Reader), ed. Mary Hawkesworth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Klassen, Chris A. Introduction to Feminist Spirituality: The Next Generation. Edited by Chris A. Klassen. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009. Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press, 2005. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984). Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007. Muro, Ealasaid. “Feminism: A Fourth Wave?” Political Insight 4.2, August 23, 2013. Accessed September 14, 2014. http://www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/feminism-fourth-wave. Ozorak, Elizabeth Weiss. “The Power, but Not the Glory: How Women Empower Themselves through Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35.1. March 1, 1996. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed October 2, 2014). Peay, Pythea. “Feminism’s Fourth Wave: A New Kind of Activism is Gathering Women Across Faiths.” UTNE Reader. March/April 2005. Accessed September 12, 2014. http://www.utne.com/community/feminisms-fourth-wave.aspx. Roach, Catherine M. Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Snyder, R. Claire. “What Is ThirdǦWave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Signs 34.1(2008). JSTOR. Accessed August 30, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ 588436 Stackhouse, John G., Jr. Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005. Stabile, Susan J. “Can Secular Feminists and Catholic Feminists Work Together to Ease the Conflict Between Work and Family.” University of St. Thomas Law Journal 4.3 (2007). Accessed August 30, 2014. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1028884. Stan, Adele M. “‘If We Each Have a Torch, There’s a Lot More Light’: Gloria Steinem Accepts the Presidential Medal of Freedom.” RH: Reality Check, November 20, 2013. Accessed June 6, 2014. http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/11/20/if-we-each-have-a-torchtheres-a-lot-more-light-gloria-steinem-accepts-the-presidential-medalof-freedom/. Taylor, Charles. “A Secular Age: Buffered and Porous Selves.” Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere. September 2, 2008. Accessed August

Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism(s) and the Christian University

35

31, 2014. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porousselves/. Valenti, Jessica. The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2010. Van Deven, Mandy. “Oh my God(dess)! Feminist Spirituality in the Third Wave.” Religion Dispatches, August 31, 2009. Accessed September 2, 2014. http://religiondispatches.org/oh-my-goddess-feminist-spiritualityin-the-third-wave/. Winter, Katy. “‘You are married to the Lord and your daddy is your boyfriend’: Purity balls, in which girls ‘gift their virginity’ to their fathers until marriage, sweeping America.” Daily Mail Online, March 21, 2014. Accessed August 30, 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2586036/You-married-Lorddaddy-boyfriend-Purity-Balls-girls-gift-virginity-fathers-marriagesweep-America.html.

Notes 1

John G. Stackhouse argues in Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender that churches reject a feminist ideal even when it is also a Christian principle. For example, on the matter of egalitarianism, Stackhouse notes, “Now, however, that modern society is at least officially egalitarian, the scandal is that the church is not going along with society, not rejoicing in the unprecedented freedom to let women and men serve according to gift and call without an arbitrary gender line” (56). 2 There are a number of third-wave feminists who continue to argue that stripping is, under some circumstances, empowering for women; see, for example, Catherine M. Roach, Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture. For an opposing view, see Sheila Jeffreys, “Keeping Women Down and Out: The Strip Club Boom and the Reinforcement of Male Dominance.” 3 Baumgardner and Richards rely on the opinions of the authors of articles in Newsweek (1990) and Time Magazine (1998) on the possible demise of feminism. 4 Further, by conceiving of the father/daughter relationship as a type of romantic training ground for a future sexual relationship, a young girl would find it difficult to understand relationships with men outside of a sexual context. 5 For a personal account of a Christian feminist being censured by members of both camps, see Vicky Beeching, “Christian Feminism is Not an Oxymoron”. 6 Stackhouse also provides a helpful definition of the chief aim of feminism: “to champion[] the dignity, rights, responsibilities, and glories of women as equal in importance to those of men’ and to ‘therefore refuse[] discrimination against women” (17). 7 Here we allude to the phrase in Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I dwell in possibility…”

36

8

Chapter Two

Harper’s blog includes a link to the study: http://www.pewforum.org/. Having said this, we do not wish to diminish Ozorak’s finding that “[m]ost of the women in this study recognized that by hierarchical and social standards, organized religion does not treat them as well as it might” (27). On a related note, Aune’s study (2011) showed that when second-wave feminists “did […] address religion and spirituality specifically”, there were two groups who did not completely abandon traditional religion: “religious reformists [who] sought equal opportunities within existing religious structures” and “religious revisionists [who] reinterpreted religion through the lens of women’s experiences and restructured it accordingly” (46). These two types are differentiated from “spiritual revolutionaries” and “secular feminists” (ibid.). 10 On “third-way” politics, see Steve Bastow and James Martin, Third Way Discourse: European Ideologies in the Twentieth Century. 11 Emma Watson’s speech can be viewed on YouTube. A transcript of the speech is also available online: http://sociology.about.com/od/Current-Events-inSociological-Context/fl/Full-Transcript-of-Emma-Watsons-Speech-on-GenderEquality-at-the-UN.htm. 9

CHAPTER THREE MAN, WHAT A BATTLE!: FACING THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE AS A FEMINIST THEOLOGIAN AT A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY KENDRA WEDDLE IRONS

I thought I had arrived: a tenure-track position at a Christian university. Ambitious—and naive—I settled into my office mid-July, eagerly anticipating the opportunities to teach and to create new collegial bonds with like-minded persons at a Christ-centred institution of higher learning. Having all but squelched the little voice in the back of my head that kept raising persistent questions about the overwhelming maleness of my new department, I reassured myself that the disproportionate ratio was not a problem. I was wrong. The annual faculty retreat, heralded by many as the highlight of each year, quickly oriented me to my new disorienting reality. While my status as one of the new faculty members ensured many introduced themselves and offered genuine welcome, the reality of being the new female hire in the religion department also meant I was a spectacle: who was this woman willing to throw in her lot with that male bastion of ten? While I wanted to fit in, I felt lost in my sea of otherness; I was painfully aware of my invisibility. The retreat’s lectures and break-out sessions were punctuated with worship, mostly comprised of hymn singing and Bible reading. As voices joined together to praise God, mine felt silenced. Here, for the first time in nearly fifteen years, I was deliberately excluded by overwhelmingly masculine language. Men were to rise up as the “faith of our fathers” reverberated around the room through the deep voices of the male majority. I had landed in an unapologetic patriarchal community.

38

Chapter Three

Reeling from the retreat, I reassured myself that students would be further along in their understandings of gender and language, that perhaps they had learned from their astute high school teachers about the harmful effects that language can create when used as an oppressive tool. Instead, the retreat was a foreshadowing of my classroom; the first day signaled a clear indication that my academic honeymoon was over before it had begun. As my first year Bible students and I worked our way through the syllabus I had carefully crafted, they immediately recoiled from my inclusive language policy, and were even further put off to learn I required the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.1 Fall-out ensued almost before I returned to my office. I was quickly informed the unofficial departmental policy was to use the New International Version (NIV), the flagship translation of most American evangelicals. Before my first week concluded, I had committed the most egregious sin possible for a new faculty member: I had done things differently. As the churning storm clouds turned ominous, I stood in front of forty firstyear very earnest and self-righteous students, trying—in vain—to explain how language shapes our thinking and our experiences and thus requires precision and care.2 I read to them excerpts from the New Revised Standard Version translation introduction, hoping clarity would dispel the gathering thunder. This was not a rogue translation, I told them. As numerous questions were hurled at me, I opted for transparency, sharing with these shocked students how some of my early familial and youth group stories fostered in me a commitment to justice and fairness and that in my classroom, even if these students were not experiencing this elsewhere, we would work together to ensure all voices would be heard, even and especially those of women. I would have thought the women in my class would support this objective. Again, I was wrong. Most of these young female students did not want to be heard, and none of them thought they wanted to hear from me. Protective “helicopter” parents, too—earning their hovering label with ease—wasted no time using their circles of influence to ensure administrators they had no intention of supporting a university that employed someone so liberal, someone with the audacity to challenge exclusive language, to take seriously the effects of speech. At the end of my disastrous first semester, though it would have been far easier to opt for the safer tactic of fitting in, I would not change my decision, even for the infernal side-effects it caused. Rather than meeting the faculty’s expectation that next time around I would adopt the New International Version, I asked my department colleagues to consider

Man, What a Battle!

39

adopting a different translation. Several seemingly infinite and tense Tuesday afternoons passed as I was asked to support my reasons for forcing the religion department to put the university at financial risk by alienating our constituency. After all, most of our students come from churches using the NIV and who were we to dismantle this particular Biblical bedrock? Because of my commitment to gender equity through language, I was labeled the campus “feminazi.” In the Spring 2007 issue of the campus newspaper a large cartoon appeared depicting me with a “Hitleresque” mustache in front of seated students wearing prison garb. Speaking from a lectern, I was presented by the two cartoonists—who had neither ever met me, nor taken one of my classes—as pontificating on the phrase: “Jesus was a woman.” Underneath, the caption read: “In Dr. Irons’s class, some facts are relative.” Administrators were quick to offer their verbal support, though they were less certain about knowing how to proceed. Conversations with the Dean, Provost, and Vice-President of Faculty Development all revealed a collective lack of resolve. One offered to write a letter of personal support to appear in the next issue of the paper; another had no suggestions but wanted me to know he understood this was not a fair representation of me; the third suggested I probably should do nothing hoping any reference to the cartoon or further caricatures of me as “feminazi” would dissipate quickly. My one request—to dedicate one issue of the campus paper to examining sexism on campus—failed to gain traction as a viable response.3 In hindsight, the unacknowledged yet pervasive sexism not just on one Christian college campus but on many is not surprising. While most administrators and faculty might adhere to theologies where women and men are believed to be equally valued by God,4 this belief is seldom examined within the context of patriarchy, and consequently does not work itself out in new awareness and practice. Without going beyond superficial interaction with feminist theology and Biblical hermeneutics, people do not have the necessary tools to establish true gender equity. The result, of course, is a contradiction between belief and practice, a reality to which most any woman on a Christian campus can attest. As students and faculty share life-changing ideas, as college pastors and spiritual formation groups explore and nurture deepening spiritual realities, women learn—by both their exclusion and a persistent resistance to perceive God in any way other than male—that they are secondary. Women’s otherness occurs when Bible studies focus on male characters to the near exclusion of female ones; when Bible translations eschewing women’s presence are utilized rather than ones that seek to address

40

Chapter Three

linguistic sexism; when referring to God as “Father” to the almost complete exclusion of God as “Mother” is heard multiple times a day. Further diminishment of women’s presence occurs when worship bands in chapel are more frequently led and populated by men; when student chaplains are disproportionately male; even when textbooks chosen for most courses are more often than not written by men. Men, on the other hand, by virtue of their biology, experience themselves as preferential. They learn this through the attentiveness to male characters in the Bible; through being told they are to be spiritual leaders; by assuming their prominent places as uniquely God-ordained; by experiencing over and over again that God looks like them. They are without a doubt more fundamentally divine than their female peers.5 Such contradictions between theoretical and practical theology could not be more stark.6 Yet few Christian colleges demonstrate a desire to solve this problem, an oversight resulting in part by faculty and administrators failing to understand or to take seriously the fundamental imperative for inclusive language. Ironically, secular colleges and universities are far more in tune to the oppressive potential of our speech than Christian colleges that seek to promote communities of Christ-centred learning and that Christians are called to strive for social justice. For those, however, who are committed to creating more liberating learning communities by being attentive to language, the place to begin is by cultivating awareness, by identifying the problem and bringing it to light. Early feminists instinctively did this, but many Christians retreat to the corner in a spirit of backlash against feminism, refusing to identify the oppression they routinely experience. Despite the qualms they may have, women need to tell their stories: the good, the bad, the ugly. While many are fearful of such transparency because others may judge them as angry and too assertive, these stories create a necessary foundation and provide opportunity for institutional repentance. There is considerable risk of repercussion, but women must move beyond their silence. In their reticence to speak, they are presenting themselves as the “good” woman—the silent woman—rather than using their voices as catalysts for change. A supportive community is paramount for women who are willing to use their voices for justice. Regular opportunities to share experiences, to navigate rough waters, and to provide safe spaces for truth telling cannot be underestimated. These groups can inspire women to stay in institutions, working for change rather than succumbing to the oppression through silencing their voices or leaving the burdensome and discouraging atmosphere altogether.7

Man, What a Battle!

41

Christian colleges must also be committed to inclusive language policies. All faculty members should be instructed on inclusive language. No one would find it acceptable to discriminate against someone by virtue of race or physical ability or a host of other characteristics. Therefore, to tolerate discrimination based upon gender suggests something deeper than academic freedom is at stake.8 As much as inclusive language policies with regard to people will work toward bringing theology and practice together, the more difficult but equally important shift needs to occur in how people speak about God. While Christian theology has always supported the Mystery of the divine, reliance upon masculine images and male names has distorted this Mystery into one dimension. Transcending such idolatry will take imagination and creativity, but such efforts can pay ample dividends. One experiment I tried involved offering students an opportunity to pray to Mother God for one month and to record reflections accompanying their prayers. While less than twenty-five percent of the class responded to my invitation, what all the respondents discovered was life-changing and confirms the necessity of these kinds of experiential learning experiments aimed at revealing the extent to which language affects us. In their various journals, each student (all female) recorded at some point how she felt heretical when praying to Mother God, hearing condemnations of paganism ringing in her ears. One student even penned a poem called “Domestic Violence” where the divine feminine was overpowered by the male divine who said, “I am not your mother.” These negative messages abated over the month-long period as students became more comfortable with a new image of God. Some reported feeling over time that a masculine God truly did not understand them. Before the project as each student had embraced her new commitment to feminism, she had felt more alienated from God, that embracing her self as a woman of worth and autonomy had somehow made her less acceptable to God whose male gaze judged her with censure. Yet, as students shifted to feminine images of God, this existential distance closed so that feelings of divine intimacy re-emerged. In a couple of cases, other remarkable insights surfaced. One student realized that how she prayed seemed to be steeped in long-held stereotypes: with “Father God” she asked for protection and preservation, but with “Mother God” she sought instruction, advice, or affirmation. She wondered if her experiment of praying would enable her to see her parents in a different light. Another student recalled while praying to a male God, she often asked for help and was frustrated and disappointed because she believed these prayers went unanswered. Once she began praying to a

42

Chapter Three

feminine God, her prayers shifted from asking for help to requesting that she feel connected to God’s presence. Feeling embraced, her tone shifted as she moved away from a place of frustration and anger and became grateful and appreciative of life. Despite the initial challenge of this experiment, each student registered a surprise by the end of the month when she realized she had become more committed to prayer. For some who believed their newly emerging feminism was fundamentally at odds with their faith, they experienced the possibility of fully integrating their views of human equality with their new understandings of God. The ones who had previously confided that they probably could no longer see Christianity as a viable option, that the contradictions between their faith and their feminism were too vast, began to see flourishing avenues of devotion as possible. This experiment suggests that other creative projects could produce similar insights and experiences. With the right preparation and perhaps with a variety of perspectives from which to choose, students are remarkably open to new outlooks, and they, in turn, can help to make these new and redemptive insights relevant in the larger community. The more difficult task, however, is with existing faculty, staff, and administration who have been able to maintain their sexism in language comfortably. People often ground arguments for continued use of exclusive male language for God in Jesus’s referring to God as Father, yet the Bible utilizes many metaphors for God including rock and gate, a farmer and a mother hen, a midwife and a woman searching for her lost coin.9 As well, the Bible’s clearest metanarrative—the one that runs from the beginning in Genesis to the end in Revelation—is that God’s dream is justice and liberation for all people.10 Yet, there is little reality of that fullness when God is confined to masculine images and metaphors. Policies and procedures can eliminate superficial discrepancies, but only reshaping our language can address our deep-seated prejudices and combat women’s internalization of inferiority that comes from being invisible, other, and different. Of course women who work in Christian institutions suffer the most as long as patriarchal preference at their institutions is endorsed. The corresponding reality is that these communities are not as strong as they could be and are incapable of utilizing all of their resources because they have truncated the gifts and talents of women. Imagine the vibrancy of universities where everyone felt empowered to speak. If all members of any sex contributed fully to the visions and values of their institutions, Christian higher education would experience a remarkable transformation.

Man, What a Battle!

43

Until this reality of presence and justice is established, however, those who are committed to a vision of equality must be vigilant in working together. The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) could serve as an excellent resource in promoting more gender equity on Christian college campuses. With its recent election of Shirley Vogelzang Hoogstra as president and its continuation of the Women’s Leadership Development Institute, the CCCU is poised to foster collective endeavours that have the potential to reshape Christian colleges into communities that bring their theology and practice into greater alignment. At the same time, to date the CCCU website (www.cccu.org) hosts some articles and surveys related to gender, but there is still a surprising dearth of resources related to inclusive language statements or policies. Without organizations like CCCU taking seriously the problem of language, Christian colleges will remain strongholds of patriarchy,11 substituting anemic visions of wholeness for the flourishing potential of Christ-centred justice communities. I no longer teach at a Christian university. My reasons for leaving— entirely my own—are unrelated to the institutionalized sexism on campus and how it affected me. In fact, since my departure I’ve come to realize my situation was not really about me. I imagine any other feminist in my position would have met similar resistance because the institution was not ready to assess its masculine bias. What institution is, after all? From the halls of Congress to the offices of most corporations to our churches’ pews, the evidence is clear that women are not equal to men. Nevertheless, there is a white lining in this sexist cloud: Christ-centred universities could still lead the way; they could be transformers of sexist Christianity and culture. The possibility is within reach for Christian institutions to shed their sexist pasts and to embrace fully what we claim: that all people are made in the image of God. And this isn’t a battle; this is just good theology.

Bibliography Aldredge-Clanton, Jann. In Whose Image?: God and Gender. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991. Borg, Marcus J. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001. Creegan, Nicola Hoggard and Christine D. Pohl, Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy. Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2005.

44

Chapter Three

Daly, Campbell. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Gross, Rita M. Feminism and Religion: An Introduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. New York: Continuum, 2007. —. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992. Jule, Allyson and Bettina Tate Pedersen, Editors. Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. LaCelle-Peterson, Kristina. Liberating Tradition: Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2008. Scanzoni, Letha Dawson and Nancy A. Hardesty. All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today. Third Edition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992.

Notes 1

Prior to teaching at this Christian university, I taught at two different places that had religious underpinnings but were not evangelical, and I had been requiring inclusive language of my students for several years without incident. My experience confirms Nicola Hoggard Creegan’s and Christine D. Pohl’s assertion that “conservative institutions are often very wary of political correctness or of PC language, a turn of phrase that tends to denigrate inclusiveness and to put the onus for justifying equality on the woman or minority.” Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2005), 46. 2 Elizabeth A. Johnson says it better: “While language reflects our world, it also shapes the way we construct our experience of the world. As hallowed by tradition and currently used, all-male images of God are hierarchal images rooted in the unequal relation between women and men, and they function to maintain this arrangement.” Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (New York: Continuum, 2007), 96. 3 Creegan and Pohl suggest that when criticism is consistent or public, the administration should view the situation as more than an individual problem and instead address it as an institutional problem. 183 4 It is important to note as well that in most evangelical institutions “doctrinal boundaries are closely guarded […].” Ibid., 163. 5 This experience vividly mirrors what Johnson says about the connection between male images of deity and men’s power. “Exercising public authority in the church, men assumed the right to speak of God; their own privileged position then served

Man, What a Battle!

45

as the chief model for the divine. As a result, verbal depictions of God in liturgy, preaching, and catechesis, along with visual representations in art, have forged a strong link in the popular mind between divinity and maleness.” Quest for the Living God, 98. 6 In truth, the theologies embraced in many Christian institutions are fundamentally patriarchal. The approach has often been to add a little insight from women to the mix rather than to allow a feminist critique to leaven the whole. In this regard, I have found Bettina Tate Pedersen’s essay, “Christian Feminist or Feminist Christian: What’s Feminism Got to Do with Evangelical Christians?” very helpful. See Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen, Editors, Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 9-34. 7 While these informal gatherings can be life-giving for women, my experience is that they can also be viewed as suspect by male colleagues or administrators. Nevertheless, women who are on the frontline of gender equity on their campuses will not be able to sustain their work without creating a supportive community. 8 Some Christian colleges are taking positive steps related to inclusive language. Wheaton College, for example, has as inclusive language policy articulated on the website. The caveat, however, is that it does not extend to speaking of God and therefore cannot fully address the related implications I have mentioned in this essay. 9 Kristina Lacelle-Peterson points out the inconsistency of this perspective when she notes the people who justify using only masculine language for God because of Jesus’s use of “Father” do not also argue for always praying the Lord’s prayer, which is the context for their argument. Liberating Tradition: Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2008) 222. 10 I was first introduced to this metanarrative of justice through Marcus Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001). 11 A recent article offers hope for change but also evidence of the continuing resistance to feminism at Christian colleges. See http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/08/03/feminism-remainscontroversial-at-wheaton-college-but-these-women-are-trying-to-change-that/. See also http://www.eewc.com/BookReviews/feminism-in-peril by Melanie Springer Mock whose experience teaching at a Christian college reveals the challenge of feminism on her campus.

CHAPTER FOUR THE CHALLENGES OF TEACHING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AT A CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL UNIVERSITY: THE PEDAGOGY OF INDIRECTION ROBERT DOEDE

I teach philosophy at a Canadian evangelical university. I believe that a Christian university needs to be a place where Christians bring their teachings and traditions into open, honest, and respectful dialogue with the institutions, ideals/ideas, and movements of their culture. In this setting, a student can seek to discover, understand, and engage both the redemptive and the reductive forces that operate through their culture’s institutions, ideals/ideas, and movements. I also believe that there are expressions of feminism that have catalyzed and mobilized redemptive forces that converge with Christian teachings and traditions in a number of ways (perhaps because they have to some degree arisen out of Christian teachings and traditions), including feminist commitments to: redeeming humans from oppressive societal structures; liberating the environment from exploitative economic forces; caring for the weak and voiceless; and respecting the material conditions that shape human identities and sustain bodily integrities. This is why, about a decade ago, I petitioned the administration at my university for authorization to create and teach a “Feminist Philosophy” course. After some initial resistance due to the conservative nature of the university, I was granted that permission. This essay discusses some of the struggles I encounter and strategies I deploy in coping with the challenges of teaching Feminist Philosophy in a conservative evangelical university, but before I do that, I should say a word about my journey into feminism.

48

Chapter Four

Some Background Context: Learning from My Own Journey into Feminism While I came to Christianity in my junior year of high school, I was a PhD student before I would self-identify as a feminist. The church where I was converted held conservative views about the demarcation of gender roles, which I rather passively assimilated along with many stereotypical evangelical doctrinal positions. My outlook on gender and feminist issues really didn’t change much until, as an aspiring philosopher, I began reading the writings of feminist philosophers. I did not peruse them because I was interested in feminism per se, but rather I did so as an act of desperation in my growing disillusionment with certain existentially barren approaches to philosophy I was encountering in my doctoral studies. I was originally drawn into studying the feminist philosophers when I more or less stumbled upon their writings during my PhD thesis research on embodied cognition and the role of the body and social structure in the emergence and expression of mind. I was dissatisfied with the work being done in analytical philosophy of mind at this time (the mid-1980s) because it seemed still beholden to impossible objectivist ideals rooted in Enlightenment rationalism and, consequently, ignored the place of the living body in the emergence and functioning of human intelligence. As I read more and more of the writings of feminist philosophers, I discovered that in terms of my values and philosophical commitments I had a lot more in common with a number of them than I would have ever imagined. I found feminist thinkers who, like me, were contesting the ultimacy of the traditional divisions of mind from body, of nature from nurture, of emotion from reason, and of moral responsibility from concrete material contingencies. Also like me, these feminist thinkers were exploring how challenging the status quo on these issues might enhance the possibilities of liberating both females and males from hegemonic societal entrenchments. So it was their critiques of specific lingering influences of Enlightenment masculinist objectivism in certain sectors of contemporary analytical philosophy that initially attracted me to their writings. It was only a matter of time before my alignment with their critiques of objectifying and reductive accounts of human nature awakened me to the importance of actively identifying with some of the central feminist social causes. At this point, my feminism became increasingly conscious and intentional: I realized that there is an impulse within feminist philosophy that, like the Christian Gospel, seeks not merely to free human beings from reductive self-understandings, but to challenge oppressive private

The Challenges of Teaching Feminist Philosophy

49

and public structures that create and support asymmetric opportunities for human flourishing. In my search for the means to bring my Christian values into my research, I found the feminists’ radical questioning of key assumptions embedded in the heart of analytical philosophy not only consonant with, but appreciably expansive of, my own Christian values. This backstory of my journey into feminism has helped me to identify with a majority of the students showing up in my Feminist Philosophy class. Let me explain.

Quest for Orientation I wanted my Feminist Philosophy course to loosen the grip of the Enlightenment prejudices and hierarchal sexism that I expected many of my students would have unwittingly absorbed from the neoliberal politics pervasive in North America and from their evangelical upbringings—both of which I expected to have had a hand in shaping their interpretations of the Bible and informing their conceptions of feminism. I wanted this course to open their minds to the possibility that feminism might have something of value to contribute not only to their lives but also to their faith. My aim was not to make fervent feminists out of my students but to draw them into a more sympathetic examination of its central commitments and causes such that they might recognize aspirations similar to those their Christianity had engendered in them. This, however, turned out to be no modest goal; a significant percentage of the students who have taken this course over the past seven years told me that they signed up expecting merely to consolidate their antagonism toward feminism. In fact, some students came to my Feminist Philosophy classes to learn about feminism so as to better curtail its influence in the church and broader culture. Recognizing that my classes were not going to be filled with students eager to take up feminist causes, or even to sympathize with some of their ideas, I began to reflect on what had brought me to surrender my somewhat narrow views regarding gender roles and embrace the value and promise of feminism. I realized that much of my early academic training in Biblical studies and theology had opened my mind and inclined my heart to the values and concerns expressed in much of feminist thought long before I ever consciously identified with certain of their causes and social goals. I recognized that what I had learned in my undergraduate studies at a Christian liberal arts college helped me begin to see that some of the issues that Biblical authors were centrally concerned about were not all that different from certain feminist concerns. It finally dawned on me that, in their not so different ways, both Christianity and feminism pursue

50

Chapter Four

human (and ultimately all of creation’s) liberation from oppression, affirm human dignity and agency, respect the integrity and value of the material world, and recognize that human bodies are not incidental domiciles of souls, but the essential fabric of humans being-in-the-world. In fact, as I mentioned above, it was in the writings of the feminist philosophers, rather than in the masculinist treatises of the analytical philosophers that I found assistance for further articulating and expanding the meaning and relevance of these Biblical themes. In short, I found the ideas put forward and values affirmed by certain feminists to be in strategic alignment with those that my Christian commitments had engendered in me. Yet, as I reflect back on my undergraduate self, given the inadequate and one-sided ideas about feminism I had acquired from my church’s teachings and from the images of it purveyed through the media, I know that had I been directly confronted with feminism in my undergraduate studies and invited to join its ranks, I would have no doubt rejected the invitation. I would have surely done my best to keep my distance from the movement. It was this insight that steered me into practising in this class what might be loosely referred to as a pedagogy of indirection.

Towards a Pedagogy of Indirection Here I need to say a bit about Kierkegaard’s notion of “indirect communication” since it played significantly into the pedagogy of indirection I use in this course. Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher known today as the “father of existentialism”, wrote his master’s thesis on the topic of Socratic irony. He learned from Socrates that when it comes to life-changing awakenings, the teacher’s most direct route to the students’ existential uptake—that is, the students’ living out the import of what they learn—is indirection. Socrates referred to himself both as a gadfly (i.e. an irritating insect, a horse-fly—see Apology 30e) who persistently seeks to disrupt the societal status quo by asking questions no one else is asking, and as a midwife who enables and births wisdom in others which he himself does not possess (The Theaetetus, 150 b-c). No doubt Kierkegaard was a consummate gadfly to the Danish culture of his time; he was, however, perhaps more significantly a skilled and effective practitioner of midwifery, having brought this ancient Socratic art to a new level. While Socrates, feigning to be ignorant himself, would ask subversive questions of those in Athens who claimed to be wise so as to make apparent their own unrecognized ignorance, Kierkegaard would claim not to know what a Christian is, so he could insinuate questions that would awaken those in the “Christian nation” of

The Challenges of Teaching Feminist Philosophy

51

Denmark to the possibility that perhaps there was more to being a Christian than their having been baptized into the State church. Kierkegaard believed that these self-deceptions and illusions of selfunderstanding “can never be removed directly [….] one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion” (POV, 24-25). “A direct attack,” he says, “only strengthens a person in his illusion” (POV, 25). This is why Kierkegaard the gadfly made it the goal of his authorship to sting or “wound from behind” (J 734)—to leave his readers alone with a nagging thought that would take time to release its full charge of meaning. Kierkegaard found examples of indirection in the ambiguity of God’s presence on earth, i.e. for every case of evidence for a loving Creator’s care in creation, there are other equally compelling evidences of God’s indifference or absence (Phil Fragments, 51-52). Jesus’ own ministry is a case study in indirection: Jesus rarely directly confronted the self-deceptions of his hearers. He more often used understatement, overstatement, questions, ironic statements, parabolic statements, hyperbole, and silence—indirect communicative tropes that demand more self-involving interpretative participation on the part of the hearers. In doing so, he created occasions for his audience to learn something important about themselves that was getting in their way of hearing Him: “Direct communication presupposes that the receiver’s ability to receive is undisturbed” (POV, 40). The selfdeceived, when directly confronted, tend to respond with immediate instinctual self-defensive reactions that only further entangle them in their illusions. Following Socrates and Jesus’ lead, Kierkegaard used forms of indirection throughout his pseudonymous authorship. His pseudonymous works depicted the lives of fictitious characters who embodied various kinds and degrees of self-deception that Kierkegaard used to subtly lure his unsuspecting readers into seeing themselves in the self-deceptions those characters enacted. He used indirection to raise his readers’ selfawareness and their capacities to honestly question themselves. He knew that if he directly confronted the motivated distortions held by his readers, they would take offence at him and never directly and honestly encounter themselves. Direct communication tends to disable the existential uptake of the truths the self-deceived are invested in keeping at bay. What really moves us existentially cannot be directly confronted; catalysts of existential change occur on the margins, as deflections along life’s way. Kierkegaard’s indirect discourse has roots not only in Socratic irony, but also in God’s revelation both in the Old and New Testaments. God never directly reveals Himself (even the Incarnation is a form of indirection1) and rarely directly imposes His values on history or, for that

52

Chapter Four

matter, on human consciousness. In fact, what Biblical scholars refer to as “progressive revelation” is an example of how God indirectly communicates what His creatures are not ready to hear. In such cases, God typically accommodates His revelation to their cognitive limitations and moral horizons. William J. Webb2 identifies this strategy of indirection in reference to God’s response to the slavery and patriarchy practised by the Hebrews. One does not find God directly confronting the injustices of slavery or patriarchy. He did not parachute into history ideas like monogamy, human rights, or equal rights, which would have no grounds of comprehension in cultures that know only of hierarchy and class division. Rather, He first enjoins His followers to live graciously in the darkness of these unjust practices, injecting a subtle new trajectory into their historical circumstances and a slowly dawning light into their thinking, thereby catalyzing a new, redemptive dynamic of baby-stepping the rise of their moral consciousness. Webb notes that “not everything within Scripture reflects the same level of ethical development” (41)—so we must recognize that what might be normal for God’s people at one time isn’t necessarily normative for God’s people all the time. God indirectly, yet persistently, interrogates the consciences and cultures of His people over time through historical contingencies that progressively encourage critical reflection on their own practices and values. John Stackhouse3 develops the gender implications of Webb’s insight: “Careful reading of [the biblical] text […] shows us a double, not a single, message. We see an affirmation of equality of men and women that should issue eventually in the abolition of patriarchy. Yet we also see a temporary and culturally conditional accommodation to patriarchy pending the changed social circumstances in which patriarchy can be done away” (11). According to Stackhouse, God works within human limitations—both individual and corporate—to transform the world according to His good purposes. He respects our historical embeddedness and works within those confines, indirectly prompting and patiently waiting for the historical and cultural conditions to emerge that will provide fertile soil for the uptake of the ultimate demands of justice and mercy. Thus, in the life of Jesus, instead of directly overthrowing the unjust gender entrenchments in a culture that was not capable of comprehending the moral and spiritual basis of the overthrow, we see him repeatedly transgressing acceptable gender lines, finding routes through established gender privileges, to prepare the ground for understanding the more radical implications of the kingdom of God. Considering that indirection might be a helpful strategy for dealing with illusions where there is some existential investment in maintaining

The Challenges of Teaching Feminist Philosophy

53

them, it became clear to me that my Feminist Philosophy class would provide an ideal venue in which to test the efficacy of this tool because taking feminism seriously (as we do in this class) has its risks for everyone. In quite general terms, for a man, subscribing to feminism, that is, being dis-illusioned concerning his conception of feminism, involves the risk of divesture of everything that comes unearned with male privilege, and for a woman, such dis-illusionment risks divesture of what de Beauvior calls the “easy path” whereby woman, in unacknowledged complicity with male privilege, “derives satisfaction from her role as Other,” conveniently making herself into “a thing” and thereby avoiding the “anguish and stress of [an] authentically assumed existence”.4

Some Pedagogical Strategies of Indirection Using indirection to deal with the challenges of teaching Feminist Philosophy at a conservative evangelical university has been an effective way to minimize the defensive and reactionary responses that can very easily arise within evangelical Christian communities when the topic of feminism is broached. Employing a number of key strategies has helped me connect to students whose attraction to this course is driven more by suspicion than sympathy. After I introduce the course and its requirements to my students, I pass out a questionnaire that probes their understanding of sex and gender, of gender roles, of the Bible’s view(s) on gender roles, and finally about their own positioning in regard to feminism. I have found that on average only about two percent of my students self-identify as feminist despite the fact that almost all of them believe that all humans regardless of sex are, in principle, equal before God. My Feminist Philosophy class, it turns out, is repeatedly populated with a majority of Christian complementarians5 who, although they accept that man and woman are equal before God, nonetheless, reject the label “feminist” either because they believe feminism affirms such things as female superiority and requires the embracing of lesbianism or because feminism is “so yesterday”—given its past successes, there is no longer any need for a feminist movement or association with a redundant movement that bore such a chequered past.6 Although most of the students entering my class on the first day would not label themselves as anti-feminist complementarians or post-feminist complementarians, they nonetheless are. When teaching a class like Feminist Philosophy in the setting of a conservative evangelical university where almost every topic and issue is likely to ignite highly charged responses, it is absolutely essential to

54

Chapter Four

establish an atmosphere of trust and non-intimidation in which students feel it is safe to speak their mind about what they believe, to be honest about what they don’t know, and to tell the truth about their doubts, fears, and hopes. I explain that we all have our areas of intelligence and our areas of ignorance, and that we are here not to judge one other but to learn from each other—that’s why it is so important that we all feel safe to share our thoughts. I tell them that in this course we will seek to understand the philosophical ideas that have informed and shaped feminism in its multifarious manifestations, and we will explore the reasons behind feminisms’ dissatisfactions with some of the central elements of traditional philosophy. I also argue that this academic study alone is not enough. We will also need to work on ourselves, seeking to raise our own consciousness of how our personal perceptions, beliefs, language, and backgrounds, as well as our broader educational, economic, legal, political, and religious practices and institutions are saturated and shaped by unacknowledged or under-acknowledged gender distinctions and privileges that may be fundamentally unjust. I tell them that we are here to recognize and interrogate gender distinctions, privileges, and determinations in order to enlarge our humanity through expanding our understanding of how humans have used gender distinctions to reduce others’ humanity. This is where, right at the outset of the class, it is imperative that feminisms’ form[s] and content[s] emerge so that students sense early on that this course is not just about acquiring information, but also about selfformation. Highlighting this existential dimension of the course effectively prepares the ground upon which indirection can come into play. The first task I give my students is to bring to every class one or two examples of either blatant or clandestine operations of oppressive gender distinction they have detected in their homes, churches, social circles, the media, pop-culture, or in themselves. In each class period, the first fifteen minutes is devoted to students sharing their observations. We usually get to the observations of two or three students, but there are times where we will spend most or even all of the fifteen minutes discussing a single observation. I find that creating this open space for free-wheeling discussion is invaluable. It helps students to get to know each other and the array of common and differing views represented in the classroom. Students become more and more comfortable sharing and increasingly vulnerable in risking their thoughts and views. This open discussion also presents me with opportunities to preview ideas we will be analyzing later in the course, but even more importantly to ask some disturbing and difficult questions that I hope will slowly penetrate and quietly begin to dissolve

The Challenges of Teaching Feminist Philosophy

55

the students’ hardened glue of bias and passively consolidated prejudices and distortions—the residues of their years of exposure to mindless media and hermeneutical maneuverings from church pulpits. Typically, it is during this time of the semester that those who have strong views about woman’s “proper place” in the world begin to risk floating their ideas to test the waters they’ll be swimming in for the next few months. For example, a student might mention that her pastor just preached a sermon showing how the feminists, by successfully eroding God’s established order in the family, are responsible not only for the demise of the nuclear family but also for all the social ills brought about by children not having the proper role models in the home. Drawing on my awareness of Kierkegaardian indirection, I quell the temptation of being too direct in my responses to such opinions, knowing that confronting them too straightforwardly will likely be counter-productive, eliciting a defensive entrenchment that constricts rather than expands sensibilities. Because I want my students’ own processing of ideas to awaken them to new possibilities of understanding, I might ask this student how she feels about the abolition of slavery, a practice that could be supported by a number of Bible passages, and did she know that many pastors in the latter half of the nineteenth century preached sermons blaming the abolitionists for the faltering slave-less plantation economies and the rise of nanny-less deviant youth.7 My response doesn’t shut the issue down with any determinate claim, but opens the class to new avenues of thought that, even if we don’t pursue them immediately, will linger in the background of their minds and texture their thinking in the future. Another strategy of indirection I use early in the course is exposing students to an overview of the history of feminism, highlighting the fundamental tenets and differentiating focal concerns of liberal, Marxist, socialist, radical, psychoanalytic, existentialist, gender, multicultural, postcolonial, eco-, pomo- and third-wave feminism. I like to do this early in the course because the inevitable realization that feminism is not one doctrine but an immense diversity of views tends to prompt students to question the legitimacy of the inadequate caricatures of feminism they brought with them into the class. At no time do I directly affirm or condemn any one of the differing expressions of feminism covered in the overview, but I do ask probing questions about the values underlying them, seeking to evoke the perception of the Biblical roots nourishing the liberating concerns operative in all but a few expressions of feminism. As we move further into the course’s materials, I patiently and progressively expose them to feminist writings that complement Biblical teachings about

56

Chapter Four

the material world and the irreducible dignity of human beings, hoping that as they begin to recognize they have feminist allies, their false beliefs about feminism might drop by the mounting weight of evidence against them. In this way, I function as a facilitator of discovery rather than an imposer of dogma. My challenge is to nurture an openness of mind in my students such that they might begin to see through the erroneous, distorted and narrow views of feminism many of them have absorbed from the broader culture and discover for themselves how certain forms of feminism might truly express the import of some of their own dearly held Christian values. If feminism is not something they would entirely embrace, my hope is that they might at least recognize within the feminist continuum the possibility of a strategic ally such that they could comfortably self-identify as “parafeminist”8—i.e. someone whose outlook on the world is informed by the causes and concerns of feminism. Later in the course, as we read essays by feminist philosophers who embrace the various expressions of feminism covered in my overview of the history of feminism, students begin to find an alignment between some of the beliefs and values nurtured by their Christian traditions/Bible reading and the ideas and values informing the feminist readings on the syllabus. For example, students who have recognized from their evangelical upbringing that the bodily temple of the Holy Spirit is sacred ground have found creative and challenging conversation partners in Julia Kristeva’s and Iris Marion Young’s writings on objectified, abjected, and oppressed bodies. Students who have felt the male gaze oppressively prescripting our cultural spaces and deployed as an instrument of consumer capitalism are drawn to the writings of Sandra Barky, Susan Bordo, and Laura Mulvey. Students who have interests in becoming missionaries have discovered the writings of Maria Lugones, Elizabeth Spelman, and bell hooks to be especially helpful interlocutors for their thinking about nonimperialistic cultural dialogue. Students with a strong sense of stewardship responsibility for creation have found engagement with the writings of Maria Mies, Vandana Shiva, and Karen Warren to stimulate and challenge their thinking in helpful ways. Here again is indirection. Students become more amicable towards feminism itself when they discover that their Biblically driven interests correspond with the focal concerns of certain feminist philosophers or with certain “schools” of feminist thought. When students find that their thinking has been sharpened by reading feminist literature on what they consider their Biblically derived moral burdens, they become more inclined to spend more time with open minds in the company of feminist voices.

The Challenges of Teaching Feminist Philosophy

57

This brings me to my final strategy of indirection. I require that all students keep a running and dated journal wherein, twice weekly, they record their thoughts and reactions to the class discussions, lectures, and readings. I also encourage them to include their observations of, thoughts about, and reactions to anything gender-related outside of class. It is not unusual to find students entering into a kind of ‘stream of consciousness’ mode in these pages, where they seem to allow their thoughts and feelings to flow uncensored. The pages of the journal function as a semi-private space where they can try on different ideas and perspectives to see how they fit. My reading of these journals over the years has been invaluable to me in evolving the form and content of this course. Through reading their journals, I recognized that students connect with feminism when they find their Biblically motivated special interests intersect with a particular school of feminism. Students know that I do not grade these journals on whether I agree with the conclusions reached in their pages, but on what these journals reveal about the students’ efforts to deal with the material fairly and about the thought and imagination they invested in bringing the materials to bear on their lives in an effort to take up a just and honest position in their gendered worlds. Ultimately, I am not all that concerned that students self-ascribe as feminists. I do, however, want to open my students’ hearts and minds to a more capacious understanding and less restricted assessment of the movement’s amenability to the Christian faith most of them have embraced. I practise a pedagogy of indirection in this course because quite honestly it matters to me whether students fairly assess and critically engage the egalitarian vision of gender that feminist philosophy offers, and I know that this is not going to be merely a matter of getting new and radically different ideas into my students’ heads. For many of them, it will take a sort of transformation of sensibility, an existential shift in their perception of themselves and in their feel for humanity—something that cannot be accomplished instantly or directly. Judging from my experience thus far, I am rather convinced that the most direct route to this kind of existential transformation is through the detours I have highlighted above.

Bibliography Beauvior, S. de. The Second Sex. Trans. C. Borde and Sheila-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Haynes, S. R. Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

58

Chapter Four

Jones, A. “The Return of Feminism(s) and the Visual Arts, 1979–2009.” Feminisms Is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices. Ed. M. H. Hayden and J. S. Skrubbe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. Kierkegaard, S. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. D Swenson and H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. —. The Point of View for My Work as An Author: A Report to History. Ed. B. Nelson. Trans. W. Lowrie. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Levine, B. The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South. New York: Random House, 2013. Stackhouse, Jr., J. Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press, 2005. Webb, W. Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals. Downers Grove: IVP, 2001.

Notes 1

God comes to humans enfleshed such that Jesus’ divinity is not directly apparent: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” John 1: 46, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” Luke 4: 22, etc. 2 William Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2001) 3 John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005) 4 Simone de Beauvior, (Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila-Chevallier) The Second Sex (Vintage Books, New York, 2011), p. 10. Please note that I am not suggesting that all women, any more than all men, are in bad faith. But, given the number of female students who, after reading de Beauvoir’s introduction to The Second Sex, confess in their “Readings Journal” (about which more later) to grappling with this issue, I don’t think we can say that only men are invested in guarding their illusions about feminism. Nor am I suggesting that male “privilege” is either coextensive with the set of all men or experienced as privilege by all men. 5 There is a broad and relatively helpful distinction to be drawn between evangelicals who believe that although men and women were created equal before God, God intended these beings of equal worth to fill different roles/functions in the home, church, and public world (the view known as complementarianism) and evangelicals who believe men and women were created equal before God and that God intended these beings of equal worth to discover their potentialities and gifts in the home, church, and public world without any pre-assigned role/function restrictions (the view known as egalitarianism). 6 They say things like “after all, just note how many female students are in this university class”.

The Challenges of Teaching Feminist Philosophy

7

59

See Bruce Levine’s The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2013) and Stephen R. Haynes’ Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 8 Amelia Jones, “The Return of Feminism(s) and the Visual Arts, 1979–2009” in Feminisms Is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices. Ed. Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars P, 2010. Thanks to my student Matthew Wigmore for directing my attention to this article.

CHAPTER FIVE FACING THE CHALLENGES OF TEACHING GENDER AND EDUCATION IN A CHRISTIAN TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAM ALLYSON JULE

Introduction The issue of gender and education is an ever-complex one, intersecting with matters of social class and ethnicity and influenced by the quality of teaching and the surrounding school culture. Relatedly, matters that surround the notion of gender and sexualities are often uncomfortable in Christian colleges and universities. Exploring gender in teacher education at a Christian university where I am Professor of Education offers a unique site in which to explore why and how gender studies courses can be helpful to both students and the campus community. Because gender is so integral to teaching and learning, it certainly must be part of an aspiring teacher’s education. These are the challenges: to include a feminist way of understanding gender in schools and to consider how the education system itself can be gender inflected—and to do so within Christian higher education. Canadian universities have long been committed to gender equity and to exploring gender within a range of academic disciplines. Despite the importance of gender as a social identity, in the face of its profound influence on an individual’s educational experiences, and regardless of the fact that all students are “gendered” and thus potentially impacted by gender issues, attention to the subject in initial teacher education appears minimal across the country in favour of other teacher education priorities. In fact, gender regularly takes a backseat to other priorities even though teacher education is a logical and vitally important place for examining key issues that impact students. Teacher education textbooks, for example,

62

Chapter Five

devote minimal space to gender issues and, in fact, at times give the topic stereotypic and inaccurate treatment (Zittleman & Sadker, 2002). Sanders (2002) notes, “Multicultural education has become a thriving component of teacher education [while] gender equity […] is in the earliest stages of consideration” (242). Gender as a sociological variable is often discussed within teacher education programs, including my own university’s, as part of courses on educational sociology, but rather than being a focus in and of itself, it is usually presented along with other sociological variables such as race/ethnicity and social class. Ideally, attention to gender issues would be “mainstreamed” in teacher education across all Education courses (Pearson and Rooke, 1993), yet this often does not happen for a range of reasons, including lack of instructor background or interest in this area, perceived time constraints, beliefs that these issues no longer exist, or disinterest on the part of educational leaders and stakeholders. In the case of this university, the issue of gender in the teacher education program has been rarely mentioned since the program’s inception in 2001. As such, and in my opinion, separate attention through a full-credit course focused entirely on gender and education was warranted. This paper explores the challenges and defends the offering of this course, its unique class composition in relation to the specific university demographics, and ways of engaging students through cultural/media analysis and discussion-based strategies. Student responses are investigated to discern the impact of the course on future teachers. The course was first offered in 2012 and targeted undergraduate students within our concurrent teacher education program, with the purpose of developing their understanding of key gender issues in K-12 schooling.

This University Context The emergence of a progressive Gender Studies program throughout the campus is remarkable, in no small part owing to the university’s long history of conservative Christian views. It currently enrolls approximately four thousand students and sits on a 157-acre (0.64 km2) campus outside the larger metropolis of Vancouver, Canada. The university offers fortytwo undergraduate majors and sixteen post-graduate programs. Unique in Canadian higher education, this university is an independent, privately supported institution. Since its founding in 1962, it self-identifies as a Christian institution, though it has always been governed independently from any church or religious organization. Originally established as an evangelical junior college, this university became a fully accredited

Challenges in a Christian Teacher Education Program

63

university in 1985 and has offered full teacher education and teacher qualifications since 2002. The university is Canada’s largest privately funded Christian university. It is also among the most expensive universities in the country, with annual tuition fees reaching approximately $17,500 (Cdn). It has a broadbased liberal arts, sciences, and professional studies curriculum, and it has received high ratings (A+) in the annual Globe and Mail university rankings for its quality of education (every year since 2005). Students come from all areas of Canada, the US, and many other foreign countries; 72 percent of students are Canadian. The university employs a faculty of over three hundred instructors and professors, enabling a student/faculty ratio of 11:1 and an average class size of sixteen. Students who choose to enroll often do so because of its faith-based character and its unusually small classes with qualified PhD-level professors at the undergraduate level. While religious affiliation is not a criterion for admission, approximately 80 percent of undergraduates enrolled self-identify as Christian. Denominations and traditions with significant representation in the makeup of the university include the Evangelical, mainline Protestant, Mennonite, Anglican, Catholic, and Pentecostal denominations. Christian Scientists, Mormons as well as students of the Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh and Muslim faiths also attend, as do students of no faith. Every weekday morning there is a Christian chapel service, at which attendance is voluntary. Students are expected to abide by “traditional Christian principles” in their dealings with the university and with other students and sign a “Community Covenant” to this effect upon enrollment (university website). Part of the challenge is the larger Canadian context which surrounds the university. In 1995, the university first attempted to launch its teaching certification program, but the provincial governing body denied accreditation, arguing that the “Community Covenant” that students are required to sign upon enrollment is discriminatory on the issue of tolerance: those graduating from here would necessarily discriminate against LGBT students in particular. The lower courts in the province of British Columbia and, later, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of the university, stating that there was no basis for the provincial decision, and, moreover, that the concern that graduates would act in a detrimental fashion in the classroom was not supported by any evidence. Even so, the issue of homosexuality (and by extension gender issues in general) has plagued the university for many years despite there being no evidence that teachers graduating from the teacher education program show any discriminatory behaviour towards members of any minority or

64

Chapter Five

marginalized community. In fact, approximately three hundred teachers in the province of British Columbia have received their teacher education at this university, and there has been no known case of complaint regarding these teachers’ capacity to accept and nurture all students, regardless of race, belief systems, or sexual identities. This was not an isolated incident of negative press. In 2013, the university’s plan to open a law school came under attack because the provincial law societies across Canada rejected this possibility due to the “Community Covenant” and its statement on marriage as only between one man and one woman. The news coverage of the issue remains an intense one and often slanted against the university and its attempt to hold the traditional view of marriage as “religious freedom”. (Note: Same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada since 2005.) That said, the case is before the courts, and a likely settlement on the right of the university to uphold its view of marriage will not be forthcoming for some time. The conservative religious community that sponsors and governs the university largely holds views of gender as a binary of male/masculine and female/feminine. Many in this subculture would view the feminist movement as distinctly anti-family and by extension anti-Christian; however, the more progressive views of the board of governors, administration, and faculty in the early 2000s were central in propelling an active gender studies program. Many of the professors have long used gender as an element in their various courses and scholarly work. That said, it took the efforts of a task force and the support of thirty faculty members to establish the university’s Gender Studies Institute, which launched in 2008 and which openly explores issues of gender and sexuality. The goals of the institute were made clear early on: “to help faculty and students think critically about gender in theory and practice across disciplines in a range of applied contexts” (university website). Initiatives have included the establishment of monthly Gender Cafés, the annual Spring lecture evening, a post-graduate symposium, gender issues in film, and the establishment of a Gender Studies Minor; feminist scholarship is at the centre of these initiatives. No backlash to the Gender Studies Institute has come from within the university community itself, though some events and topics have received opposition from small conservative enclaves. The response from secular scholarship has been affirming in many ways. In 2012, the Gender Studies Institute received the national and feminist Canadian Association for the Study of Women in Education award as “an organization that has made an important and sustained contribution to women and education” (CASWE newsletter,

Challenges in a Christian Teacher Education Program

65

http://www.csse-scee.ca/docs/caswe/caswe_2012_september_newsletter_ sm.pdf). In 2011, the Dean of School of Education initiated a survey to explore student interest in a Gender and Education course. Sixty out of the 64 education students who completed the survey said they were “very interested” in taking a Gender and Education course, though many (26/64 or 40.6 percent) said that their university program provided “no room for any additional course whatsoever” (student course surveys). That the Gender and Education course was developed, approved through the university’s undergraduate council, and then permitted to run with fewer than the minimum number of students demonstrates a commitment on the part of the faculty and the School of Education administration in particular to encourage gender studies. The main topics the first iteration of this course addressed were: key general concepts and terminology; female and male identities; negotiating the classroom; gender equity in the curriculum; violence in schools; the interaction of gender, race and class; and single-sex versus coeducation. Related topics included historical perspectives, language and communication, and subject-specific and age-specific issues. Course readings were all from the Jossey-Bass (2002) Reader on Gender and Education (Wiley and Sons). Assignments included weekly reader-responses to the assigned readings, a book review, a term paper on a topic of the student’s choosing, and a weekly media analysis presented to the class, which culminated with a portfolio of these items. A take-home final examination was also used.

What the Students Said Students were asked to participate in research related to the relevance of this course to their teacher education program; the participants included the seven students (six female and one male) who opted to enroll in the Gender and Education course in the Spring term of 2012. All were students in the concurrent teacher education program and close to completion. They reported very little background preparation in gender issues in education upon entering the course and any experience they had appeared to be random or self-initiated and was often within the confines of the evangelical Christian subculture. All were white and middle class; all were between the ages of 22 and 24; and all self-identified as Christian. Participants completed three surveys: one upon course entrance to give background information on themselves and their thinking about gender issues in education, one to complete on the final day of the class to capture their immediate reflections on their experiences and opinions about the

Chapter Five

66

course, and one nine months after the Gender and Education course had ended to explore lasting impressions or insights. A total of twenty-one surveys (seven students x three surveys) were used for analysis. By the post-nine month mark, five of the seven participants were immersed in their practicum/professional year and teaching students of their own. The survey questions solicited participants’ thinking about gender issues in education pre- and post-enrollment in the course and about the perceived impact of the course on their professional and personal lives. Such questions were: What did you learn most in this course? How do you think the issue of gender will influence your career as a teacher? Participants’ written comments from all three sources were reviewed in order to construct conceptual categories from the data. Upon entering the course, participants named a variety of gender issues that they found most prominent in contemporary education, most citing “gender differences” as what they wanted to know more about: how are girls and boys are different? This orientation of difference became the starting point of class discussions, with a main goal to interrupt this view in favour of more nuanced understandings of gender identity. By the end of the course, all participants mentioned their earlier views as overly simplistic. Also, all of the participants made mention of the course as an elective—that gender was something they wanted to know more about. One student (1) said: I took this course as an elective, in hopes that it would broaden my horizons and push me to think differently about gender stereotypes and presuppositions.

Another student (2) said: I had not previously given the study of gender in regards to education much thought, but the professor’s comments in her other courses highlighted interests I already had and illuminated them in a new and exciting way. I enrolled in her Gender and Education course as soon as it was offered because I wanted to know more about this area that had seemed so vague and mysterious before.

Students also highlighted a profound shift in their own perspective on gender through their participation in the Gender and Education course, particularly by the post-nine month survey: (1) Previous gender and education research that had been given to me in my university courses and social circles was very one-sided and only reinforced cultural stereotypes that I had come to accept on some level.

Challenges in a Christian Teacher Education Program

67

(2) After taking this course I can say that what I learned most was how to distinguish academically based research from pop-culture based (and enforcing) research. My mind was opened to new ways of thinking about gender studies, specifically in regards to my role as an educator, and as I enter my teaching career I find this information absolutely invaluable. (3) I have never thought back to a course as much as I do this one—In the public school system I will always have students of both genders and of various sexual orientations. I feel far more equipped to deal with issues such as same-gender bullying, societally-imposed gender conundrums, how these affect my students in personal ways, and how to promote gender equality in my classroom. (4) My answer to this question relies solely on the expertise that [the professor] provided. […] We were able to delve into each issue to the fullest extent possible at this stage of our university education and were able to probe into her insights. This was perhaps the most genuine learning experience I have had to date. (5) I learned to watch how I say what I say when I address students. I further learned to never judge a book by its cover and I discovered that I have an interest in increasing the literacy of boys and girls. (6) I felt challenged to back up what I thought through the process of critical thinking over and above my emotional opinion on the matters being discussed. I felt outnumbered at times, but honestly, I think that was very good for me and taught me a lot about respect and how to respectfully and firmly assert an opinion. It also taught me to be a great listener. (7) I had to think really critically about gender and had the space to develop my own thoughts on key issues. My new understandings have lingered.

All participants mentioned the small class size as a key to the success of the course. They also mentioned the value of the course readings and assignments: (1) The small class size allowed for dialogue that would not have been available in a larger class. It allowed for hard questions to be asked in a small space. The professor was very prepared and knowledgeable and able to think outside the box to propel our thinking. (2) There were seven students in our class. It was small because it was piloted in this year and most of us were at the stage where we could take an education elective. Our course did have a good textbook, which was

68

Chapter Five an introduction to the field of gender and education, and then we were asked to do a book review on a book dealing with issues in gender and education which we would then share our findings with our peers after reading and reviewing it. I enjoyed these assignments. (3) The class size was amazing. I had to really think what my ideas were because I couldn’t just sit at the back of big lecture hall and say nothing. Everyone’s opinion was welcomed. We sat in desks that were pushed together and discussed intimate-level issues. (4) The assignments were floor-to-ceiling assignments—meaning that you could do them at whatever understanding level you were currently at and then go deeper into the topic. Every assignment was held up to university policy and very high academic standards; however, the assignments all fostered a sense of personal value and inspired a sense of academic wonder about the topics. (5) The topics were all well-chosen. Each week we would deal with a different issue in education that had to do with gender studies. Overall the assignments were extremely valuable to our learning. (6) The assignments made me think. I liked having to bring in something from the media. It was really interesting to look at some of my favourite movies and TV shows or books to see the topics we were critiquing in class. It really brought it to life.

Many students mentioned the classroom atmosphere as critical to their positive views of the class: (1) I felt that the notions that I held were challenged, which I appreciated then and now. Academically the course was designed perfectly for the level of university education that I had at that point and the topics were at time provoking—it a good way. As I developed my ideas around issues in gender an education I was challenged to question more and go deeper, and to question myself and to consider my own metacognitive processes that surrounded the ideas I held and the ideas I was developing. (2) At no point did I feel cornered or trapped, everyone’s ideas were valid and it was common to see people in the class openly say that walking into the class they thought one thing but now they had changed their mind or were on the fence—this occurred many times, and it was not uncommon to hear the words “I had not thought about that”—it was a very open environment that the professor fostered in our classroom.

Challenges in a Christian Teacher Education Program

69

(3) I am in the final stretch of my professional year of teaching practicum. Every day I consider not only how I am doing in terms of my students’ understanding, and ultimately how I am working towards gender equality in my classroom. I try to do this in the subject matter that I teach, how I present multiple perspectives throughout our study of history and modern day application of material, and how I respond to students.

When asked about the lasting value of the course, participants responded in positive ways: (1) I try to give affirmations and praise in the same amount to both genders, use the same qualifying language with both male and female students, call on both genders equally, and arrange my classroom in ways that inspire discussion between students with different points of view and perspectives. (2) I am constantly referring to the course in conversations with friends and family. It has lingered with me in my everyday life. (3) This class changed how I teach boys and girls and encouraged my sense of the worth of the individual, boy and girl alike.

Ultimately, the participants were asked to comment on the nature of the university in relation to the course material and topics. (Question: Do you think the university community you are a part of helped or hindered your growing awareness of gender in education?) (1) I think it helped. I think that the small class size and environment helped out. A bigger class and unsafe environment would have allowed for walls to remain up instead of being lowered. Having a faith-based environment allowed for a more nurturing discussion based on the moral values upon which Trinity Western stands. (2) I think that being at a smaller private university allowed deeper discussion into the question of gender and faith. This is a complex and important understanding that I believe each person should consider in depth at some point. (3) This has helped me shape my understanding of gender studies, particularly as it relates to education, in a very meaningful way. With any subculture there comes a different understanding of gender, and I believe the faith-based nature of Trinity enriched the course material.

70

Chapter Five (4) At our institution I cannot say that my awareness of gender issues was hindered, however, I can say that this course was the first time that I had to actually consider these ideas in a meaningful way. (5) We did talk about how Christianity should embrace all people with love and respect, and this included people of all gender and sexual identities. The thing that made this course work so well was that the professor was very open and did not direct or even suggest that students should agree with her. The professor wasn’t molding us into her view of things: she gave us reading material and let us talk through exploring research and scholarly articles.

All seven of the participants indicated that the main way the course impacted them was their developing more equitable professional practice. Participants also expressed a heightened sensitivity to subtle bias in themselves and others and a greater awareness of gender issues and terminology in general. In terms of professional practice, five of the seven participants reported positive changes in their interactions with and attitudes towards their current students because of the course. The open, safe environment that was deliberately created through the use of feminist pedagogy where the “personal is political” and where a relational enhanced experience is the goal. In the case of the first iteration class, summarized above, all participants voluntarily elected to take the new course; they liked its small, intimate class setting; they said it “changed their minds” about gender matters; they felt safe and able to explore and examine their own ideas; they said it increased their sensitivity to the relationship of gender and education; they felt the assignments and topics engaged them; and they believed it ultimately influenced the way they teach and/or hope to teach. Participants mentioned their own ignorance of gender matters before taking the course and so were able to view the experience as enlightening. All entered the course with a curiosity to some extent, and all seemed to express satisfaction in the opportunity to explore their questions. Many said the course “stuck” with them, that they spoke about it to their friends and family, and that they thought of it when they viewed television programs or noticed advertisements as sites of gender rehearsal. The participants said they felt the course had changed their level of sensitivity to matters of gender in the classroom, and I believe this was partly accomplished by the professor’s personal revelations in the classroom. Those who were currently in their practicum classrooms said that the course had already affected the way they teach, the way they respond to students, and the way they create equity in their own teaching practice.

Challenges in a Christian Teacher Education Program

71

The fact that students who took this Gender and Education course in a Christian context and reported some lasting effect nine months after course completion reflects the important educational notion that what teacher educators address is what their student teachers have access to learning and that small, intimate conversations in a spirit of studentcentredness can produce meaningful and lingering learning on the topic of gender. Students can’t enroll in courses that don’t exist; likewise, courses on offer must be relevant and engaging. The participants in this study pointed to a well-designed course, one fashioned on current research about gender issues in education as increasing their knowledge and awareness and improving their practice. The use of media each week was viewed by the class participants as a unique and powerful way of experiencing the practical application of theoretical notions. The summative portfolios were dynamic collections of a wide range of media sites that represented gender and education in particular ways and displayed the central learning outcome of greater sensitivity to gender in today’s classrooms.

Conclusion Because of the uniqueness of my university as a small, private, liberal arts, Christian university, the Gender and Education course appears to offer important and meaningful ways to engage with feminist pedagogy and gender equity in educational contexts. For the class participants, the experience and knowledge base were viewed as “invaluable.” Perhaps faith-based institutions have an added burden on Education professors to prepare their future teachers for public school settings where gender and sexual identity are more clearly expressed features of diversity. A qualified feminist and relational professor, a dynamic and supportive campus community regarding gender studies, as well as meaningful course methods and assignments all play roles in the success of this course. The course is now in its fourth year. Facing the challenges of engaging students at Christian universities in dialogue about gender and its force in relationships in general and within a teacher education program in particular, takes clarity of vision on the part of a feminist professor, the full support of the administration, and a well-crafted course that focuses on gender—and not as a side issue but a central one in human relationships of all sorts. Conservative Christians’ beliefs may clash with feminist understandings, but this need not prevent such courses from being offered. In fact, I would say that this is why such courses should be offered. In my case, there was little or no suspicion as to why I might be teaching such a course—there was no assumption that I had some agenda.

72

Chapter Five

The administration, the colleagues, and the students themselves saw the value in Gender Studies as a key part of the student experience at this university. It is fundamentally important that students at Christian colleges and universities have access to feminist-based courses because students want to explore the complexities concerning gender in various contexts, because the issue of gender is at the centre of much public debate, and because gender is also a basic elemental aspect of the human existence and needs to be explored as such. To ignore it would be discouraging for Christian educational institutions that can’t turn a blind eye to such a critical issue. To embrace it comes with a host of meaningful teaching and learning experiences, and opportunities to participate in the larger issue of women’s emancipation and the feminist demand for society to see the centrality of gender to the human experience.

Bibliography Andersen, M. L. Thinking about Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender (6th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003. Cushman, P. “Let’s hear it from the males: Issues facing male primary school teachers.” Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(3), 227-240, 2005. Fraser Institute (The). “Boys, girls and grades: How do girls and boys compare across the province.” On-line. Oldfraser.lexi.net, 2006. Oswald, D. P., A. M. Best, M. J. Coutinho, and H. A. L. Nagle. “Trends in the special education identification rates of boys and girls: A call for research and change.” Exceptionality, 11(4), 223-237, 2003. Pearson, A. T. and P. T. Rooke. “Gender studies and teacher education: A proposal.” Canadian Journal of Education. 18:4, 414 – 428, 1993. Sanders, J. “Something is missing from teacher education: Attention to two genders.” Phi Delta Kappan, 84(3), 241-244, 2002. Statistics Canada. “The gap in achievement between boys and girls.” Education Matters, 2008. www.statcan.ca. Weaver-Hightower, M. “The ‘boy turn’ in research on gender and education.” Review of Educational Research, 73(4), 471-498, 2003. Zittleman, K., and D. Sadker. “Gender bias in teacher education texts: New (and old) lessons.” Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 168180, 2002.

CHAPTER SIX FACING THE PEDAGOGICAL CHALLENGES OF CHRISTIANITY AND FEMINISM IN THE COLLEGE CLASSROOM PRISCILLA POPE-LEVISON

Opinions about the relationship between Christianity and feminism among students at the Christian, liberal arts university where I teach run the full gamut. Take Nate and Catie. Nate belongs to a large, growing, influential church in Seattle. It is pastored by a boisterous champion of the complementarian position who believes that men should hold the final authority in the church and the family. Nate grew up with this view at home and at church, so he, like many students, arrived on campus already antagonistic to feminism. Catie’s commitment to feminism is as strong as Nate’s to complementarianism. She believes that women and men are equal in all respects, so that women should have equal access to every position in the church as well as equal authority in marriage. She chooses to worship in a Seattle church with a longstanding commitment to these beliefs. Catie and Nate were friends during their first year at college; however, their conflicting views on Christianity and feminism led to an impasse and, eventually, a neglected friendship. They found themselves polarized by their divergent stances. This situation of estrangement in which these former friends found themselves is representative of many students—as well as administrators and faculty—on Christian college and university campuses. Students reflect a bewildering range of perspectives on the relationship between Christianity and feminism. In turn, these perceptions, unwittingly or consciously, influence their choice of vocation, their personal associations, even the way in which they participate in class, as I have discovered during my fourteen years of teaching undergraduates in this context.

74

Chapter Six

In my Introduction to Christian Theology course, which is a required course for all students in our core curriculum, I can count on having students who would align themselves with Catie, with Nate, and with a middle-of-the-road perspective. Added to this spectrum is my own perspective as a second-wave feminist and an ordained clergywoman with a PhD in theology. How do I keep this potentially volatile mix of differing perspectives on Christianity and feminism from exploding in the classroom? Over more than two decades of facing these pedagogical challenges, I have developed four strategic steps that surround, support, and value dissonant stances on Christianity and feminism. These steps involve getting to know each other’s worldviews and then engaging each other with stories and conversations. They are simple yet highly effective for facing the pedagogical challenges of Christianity and feminism in the classroom.

Step One: Get to know and understand students’ worldviews Let us once again use Nate as an example. Nate’s worldview is circumscribed by complementarianism. I had not heard the word until I came to this university; now I know it inside and out. I had to learn about it in order to understand students like Nate more fully. Currently, within conservative American Protestantism, complementarianism reigns as a popular construction of gender roles that many Christian college students embrace. Complementarianism assigns certain behaviours and roles to men that are different from yet complementary to those assigned to women. Advocates explain that complementarity encompasses both equality and difference between the genders, equality in terms of there being a correspondence between men and women, and difference in terms of men’s and women’s roles. Woman’s role is to submit to man as his helper; man’s role is to lead the woman. As Stephen Clark (1980) says, “Woman complements man in a way that makes her a helper to him. Her role is not identical to his. Their complementarity allows them to be a partnership in which each needs the other, because each provides something different from what the other provides” (23-24). For some complementarians, gender roles remain in place even beyond family and church; in other words, all women must submit to men as their helpers in every context. Julie Ingersoll (2003) cites a pastor in a large, Los Angeles church who describes these clearly gendered places as follows: “I would say that … there really shouldn’t be a different structure for women in society [than there is] in the church. They would need to submit to men in

Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom

75

general [….]” When asked whether a female principal would ever be hired for the school housed at his church, he responded negatively because in that situation, “there would be male teachers who would then be required to submit to female leadership, which we believe would be outside the standard of God.” Even single women, cites Ingersoll, need to be “in the context of submitting [themselves] to men in general” (19). Complementarians find a clear explication of God’s design for gender roles in their interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis. First, they look to Genesis 1 for the declaration of equality between the genders— God created male and female in God’s image (Gen 1:26-27) and assigned them jointly to take charge of the earth, to steward it together (Gen 1:2829). Curiously, Andreas Kostenberger (2004) demarcates a gendered division of labour even in God’s stewardship command in Genesis 1, one that “assigns to the man the primary responsibility to provide for his wife and children and to the woman the care for and nurture of her family” (24). Unfortunately, he offers no Biblical citation or rationale for this claim. Then in Genesis 2, complementarians locate gender differentiation and concomitant gender roles circumscribed in several places: the order of God’s creation of the sexes, man first and then woman (Gen 2:7, 21-23); the prior commands God gave just to the man (Gen 2:16-17); the man’s naming of the animals (Gen 2:19-20); the creation of woman to be “a helper” (Gen 2:18); and so on. These aspects of Genesis 2 corroborate complementarians’ insistence on male leadership and female submission. By rooting gender differences and hierarchical roles before the story of the fall of humankind in Genesis 3, complementarians contend that this was God’s design from the beginning of creation. A complementarian worldview regulates every aspect of life, from romance and marriage, to career aspirations and parenting. In recent studies of female college students, according to Katy Tangenberg (2010), investigators trace the comparison between a complementarian and an egalitarian worldview on the women’s future plans. Females in the complementarian group were “more likely to aspire to motherhood and full-time homemaker status.” They also exhibited extremely high agreement with statements, such as “The husband is the head of the home” (75.4 percent), “There will be limitations on what position I can hold in the church because of my gender” (88.6 percent), and the notion of “helper-wife” (96.7 percent). As Donna Freitas (2008) discovered in her interviews of college students, women in the complementarian group assume the more passive role in romance and dating as compared to their male counterparts:

76

Chapter Six While evangelical women grow up learning the values of patience and passivity, evangelical men are raised to believe they are active when it comes to sex, purity, and romance: they guard their women, they prove themselves chivalrous by heroic restraint, they take a woman’s gift [of virginity] as their birthright. Women by contrast, submit to their guardian, and they wait for their prince to come along and for their purity to be taken on their wedding day. (92)

To solidify their position against what they perceive as an encroaching egalitarianism in the home, church, and society, complementarians assume an embattled pose, an “us versus them” stance. The first to come under attack are feminists, followed closely by any woman who does not conform to the prescribed gender roles. A galvanizing document for complementarians, the 1987 Danvers Statement of The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (http://cbmw.org/core-beliefs/), cites these two culprits: feminists—“the increasing promotion given to feminist egalitarianism”—and women beyond complementarian roles—“the widespread ambivalence regarding the values of motherhood, vocational homemaking, and the many ministries historically performed by women.” Evidently no corresponding confusion exists concerning men’s roles in fatherhood, vocational work in the home, or the ministries men historically perform because none are mentioned in the document; in short, men never appear to be the problem, only women. In a concluding dire prediction, the Danvers statement portends, “We are convinced that a denial or neglect of these principles will lead to increasingly destructive consequences in our families, our churches, and the culture at large.” On the other side of the spectrum—often the other side of the classroom as well—are students like Catie whose worldview is decidedly feminist. Several generations removed from the epicentre of second-wave feminism in the 1960s, which focused on “legal and structural reforms,” “such as advocating for laws protecting women from sexual assault and workplace harassment, ensuring women’s access to education and sports, and making available safe and reliable birth control” (Riswold, 2010, 84), Catie and her cohorts find themselves often having to defend the term feminism. Even though subsequent generations have benefitted enormously from second-wave feminism, the F-word, as feminism is often called, still smacks of bra-burners and man-haters. This lingering debris can deter the current generation from embracing feminism. As Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune explain, “ […] if you think bona fide feminists go on marches, belong to ‘official’ feminist organisations, hate men and dress a certain way, you are less likely to identify with feminism. But if you

Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom

77

believe feminism is about equality and freedom of choice for men and women, you’re more likely to call yourself a feminist” (7). To support her feminist worldview, Catie, like Nate, appeals to the Bible and Christian tradition. She too has her preferred Biblical verses, like the story of Pentecost in Acts 2. This story about the Holy Spirit being poured out at the naissance of the Christian church has long been identified as undergirding women’s preaching. Peter quotes a passage from the Old Testament prophet Joel in his Pentecost sermon, which proclaims that the Spirit empowers men and women to prophesy, to preach, to proclaim God’s mighty acts: “This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.’” (Joel 2:28-32/Acts 2:17-18). This text held sway, for example, in the mid-nineteenth century for one of the most successful evangelists in America, Phoebe Palmer. Palmer (1859) believed that the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise in Luke 24:49—believers being clothed with power from on high—occurred in the Holy Spirit’s descent in “tongues of fire” at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). This endowment of power fell on both men and women. Palmer considered this the paradigmatic verse to support women preachers because it encapsulated the “promise of the Father,” who imparted to women the power to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ (1). More recently, Mary Stewart van Leeuwen, a social and cross-cultural psychologist and college professor, reiterates the gist of Palmer’s conclusions. Van Leeuwen (1990) refers to Pentecost as “women’s emancipation day,” because of “women’s inclusion with men in the outpouring of the Spirit” (35). Further, she suggests that Pentecost be the starting point, rather than the often forgotten act in the four-part biblical drama of God’s actions, which includes creation, fall, redemption, and Pentecost. After all, at Pentecost, the Christian church came into existence and took concrete form as the three thousand who were baptized following Peter’s sermon “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Also at Pentecost, men and women were filled with Holy Spirit and sent forth to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. Rooted in the story of Pentecost is Van Leeuwen’s definition of a Christian feminist “as a person of either sex who sees men and women as equally saved, equally Spirit-filled, equally sent” (36).

78

Chapter Six

Given the testimony of the Pentecost story and the Spirit’s longstanding activity of calling and empowering women to proclaim the gospel, B. T. Roberts, founder of the Free Methodist Church in the midnineteenth century, extrapolated that gender should not be a factor in determining whom God calls to preach. For Roberts, one pivotal question—and one only—was to be considered: Is there evidence of God’s call on this person? To answer that, he required an affirmative answer to three questions: Does this person exhibit grace? Does this person have gifts? Does this person have fruits? He asked these same questions of anyone, male or female, pondering a call to preach. As he explained in his pamphlet, The Right of Women to Preach the Gospel, “The claim of a woman, to be called of God to preach the Gospel, should not then, be rejected because she is a woman. Apply to her the same tests that you apply to a man. You judge whether a woman should teach a school, or edit a paper, in the same way that you judge whether a man should do these things. This is proper. Try in the same way her supposed call to preach the Gospel” (9-10). Along with the Pentecost story, Catie asked the WWJD question— what would Jesus do? Pursuing that question led her to discover that Jesus treated women in a way that diverged from what was considered the norm of his day. Jesus approaches women as equals and offers them compassion and friendship. As theologian Elizabeth Johnson (2002) explains, Through his ministry Jesus unleashes a hope, a vision, and a present experience of liberating relationships that women, the lowest of the low in any class, as well as men, savor as the antithesis of patriarchy. Women interact with Jesus in mutual respect, support, comfort, and challenge […] (157).

Instances of these liberating relationships between Jesus and women abound in the Gospels, such as his conversation with the Samaritan woman, the longest recorded between Jesus and another person; his acceptance of and compassion toward the woman who dared to break into an all-male dinner party and anoint his feet with her tears; his friendships with Mary and Martha; his appearance in risen form to Mary Magdalene and his charge to her, not one of his male disciples, to proclaim the news of his resurrection. In this regard, one Biblical story feminists linger over is the story of Jesus and the Gentile woman in Matthew 15:21-28. At first, Jesus doesn’t even bother to answer the woman who is shouting for him to heal her daughter. Only when his disciples implore him to send her away does Jesus acknowledge her with a curt response, which seems intended to

Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom

79

silence her and propel her exit. Rather than being shushed, however, she engages Jesus in an interchange, one that completely alters what appears to be Jesus’ intention not to grant her request that he heal her daughter: Jesus answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” (Matthew 15:24-27)

The story ends not only with his compliance with her request but also with a commendation of her faith: “Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly” (Matthew 15:28). From this point on, many Biblical scholars note a paradigm shift in Jesus’ ministry, from a focus on “the lost sheep of Israel” to one that includes Gentiles. This Christological portrait is not an elevated one in which Jesus knows everything beforehand. Rather the portrait of Jesus that emerges in his encounter with the Gentile woman admits of Jesus’ being fully human, such that he learns and grows in response to those around him. Even more, the recognition that Jesus learned from women advocates equality between men and women. Equality, mutuality, men and women forming friendships in the Gospel’s transforming power, such are the characteristics of God’s reign as modelled by Jesus. As Johnson (2001) writes, “New possibilities of relationships patterned according to the mutual services of friendship rather than domination-subordination flower among the women and men who respond and join his [Jesus’] circle. They form a community of the discipleship of equals” (157-58). Unfortunately, instead of mutuality in the Christian community, whether in the church or the college classroom, there is often distrust, harmful stereotyping, even verbal attack lobbed from both sides of the spectrum at the other. So the first step in facing the pedagogical challenge of bringing Christianity and feminism together in the classroom is to get to know well the students’ worldviews.

Step Two: Provide opportunity in class for students to identify their own worldview Coming as I do from the Wesleyan theological perspective, I contend that one’s worldview, one’s experience of life, inevitably shapes Biblical and theological interpretation. This approach is seconded by Reformed theologian, Shirley Guthrie (1994), whose textbook I assign for this class. Guthrie asserts, “we go straight to the heart of theology when we get

80

Chapter Six

personal from the very beginning” (3). Following his admonition, I say to the class, “Let’s get personal and have you discover who you are as a theologian.” Then I ask the students to write down answers, which no one else will ever see—including me—to a series of questions: What is your gender? Who makes up your family community? What ethnicity do you most identify with? What social class do you most identify with? What is your country of origin? What is your native language? How much are you at home in the North American culture? What is your political inclination? What is your religious background?

After they have worked through these questions, I share briefly with them what has shaped my worldview. I grew up in an upper-middle class, Caucasian, “Leave it to Beaver” 1950s-1960s household. My dad left the house in the morning to run his dental practice and returned to ready-onthe-table, home-cooked meals. My mom raised four kids, played bridge, bowled weekly in a noon-time league, participated in women’s groups at church, and led a Girl Scout troop. A vivid childhood memory of mine was turning the playroom into a classroom and pretending to be a teacher. I set up a few chairs for my dolls in front of a blackboard encased in a small, red cabinet decorated with cowboy designs, a discarded relic from my older brother. The blackboard sported the alphabet, and I pointed out the letters, one by one, to my dolls. Although I had fun playing teacher, I had no fixed plans about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I considered journalism, and as a high school senior, I was co-editor of the school paper. In the end, though, it was my love for the piano and for my effervescent, fun-loving elementary music teacher that propelled me into music. My goal was to take her place when she retired. Somehow, the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s seeped into the woodwork of our home. I grew up believing that I could be anything I wanted to be. Largely due to feminism, I had choices of what work I would do and how I would go about it, particularly as a white woman from a well-to-do suburban family. I had choices about whom I would marry and how we would set up our married life. I had choices about whether I would have children and how I would raise them. I had choices seemingly about everything. Then, I surprised everyone, including myself, by announcing that God had called me into the ministry. I had recently committed my own life to

Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom

81

Jesus Christ, and in that encounter, I felt convicted to head to seminary after graduation to become a minister. Immediately, I encountered a roadblock on account of my gender. When the president of a Christian organization on my college campus learned of my plans, he quoted 1 Timothy 2:12 in my face: “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” Then with a sense of glee, he proceeded to interpret that verse as Paul’s condemnation of women ministers. To be honest, I didn’t know what he was talking about; I hadn’t heard anything in my home church growing up that would preclude my decision. And besides, it was too late to turn back. God’s call was fixed, so I finished my degree in music education and headed to seminary three months later. Thanks to second-wave feminism’s influence on mainline Protestantism, when I arrived at seminary in 1980, one-third of my class were women, and the discussion about inclusive language for humanity and for God had already heated up. I found it a heady time to be in seminary, because even though we weren’t the first generation of women headed for the ministry, we were still pioneering new ground. Added to the mix, I fell in love with Jack Levison, and we began to discuss myriad choices before us—what our last names would be, how we would work out the vocations to which God had called each of us, whether we would have children, and so on. In the more than thirty years of marriage in which we have managed two vocations and two children, the path has taken more twists and turns than we ever could have anticipated; however, we remain committed to the verse that was central to our marriage vows: “Be subject to each other out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). Jack and I know all too well that our egalitarian marriage and mutual commitment to feminism is not always understood—or accepted. Even though I have been an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church for over thirty years and have served as pastor of a local church, as a college chaplain, and for the last twenty-five years, as a college and seminary professor teaching theology, church history, evangelism, and women’s studies, I still am not able entirely to escape the impact of complementarianism, even during the summer when my university is not in session. In a recent summer teaching engagement at a conservative Protestant church, Jack asked the pastor, as they were setting up the sessions, if I could take part in the teaching; the pastor responded, “She would be allowed to if you invited her to come up and teach, since you’re her husband.” Once Jack shared the pastor’s response with me, I decided to stay home and not join him for the sessions. I don’t have that same option in the classroom—not to show up to class or not to engage students with different worldviews. I’m considered

82

Chapter Six

as being outspoken on women’s issues, which can be perceived negatively by some students. Certainly the stereotype on campus of a feminist is not particularly pleasant, yet I still want to claim the word for myself. The conundrum for me then as a teacher and a feminist is finding a balance between raising women’s issues in class and simultaneously creating a safe environment for students to voice their genuine differences. So I model the importance of being honest with them about who I am, about my stance on Christianity and feminism—without beating anyone over the head with it—and I invite them to join me in learning more about each other’s worldviews.

Step Three: Tell stories Christian feminist teachers need to tell stories about themselves and about other courageous, bodacious, boundary-breaking women—stories of women who, like many of my students, share a high view of scripture, a transformative conversion experience, and devotion to a holy life. Because these women’s stories are rooted in faith, students like Nate who see core connections to their own faith do not easily dismiss their stories, and students like Caitie find the protagonists to be inspirational foremothers who braved a world even more mired in patriarchy than their own. I tell students stories about women such as Mary Lee Cagle (1928), who experienced God’s call to ministry as a teenager, but her family’s hostile response quickly quelled her enthusiasm. Her brother-in-law excoriated her, warning her that if she ever dared to preach, his children would never be allowed to acknowledge her as their aunt. In her discouragement, she recalled that she kept up the form of religion, but she lost the zeal. Her sense of a divine vocation persisted, however, and eventually she began to preach in various locations. She was quite timid at first, so she prayed for power to preach like never before, for God to turn her loose. [God] absolutely broke every fetter. […] It was the first time in her life that she could turn the pulpit loose—she ran from one end of the large platform to the other and shouted and praised God, and preached with the Holy Ghost sent down from above. […] It was a permanent loosing from that day, and she has never been bound again. Although of a shrinking, backward disposition, she has never seen a crowd since that day large enough to make her knees tremble, and she has preached to thousands. (29)

I tell stories about women such as Emma Ray (1859-1930), who settled in Seattle and whose home, built by her husband, still stands only several

Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom

83

miles from my university’s campus. She was born into slavery in Missouri and had little access to education or money. She only attended school until the fourth grade when she had to quit in order to help support her family by working as a domestic servant for a white family. Not long after she married L. P. Ray, she realized that he was an alcoholic who could not maintain employment. Eventually, they made their way to Seattle from Missouri, hoping for a fresh start. One Sunday morning in church they both experienced conversion. Immediately they headed straight to the saloon they had frequented and told their acquaintances, with whom they had danced, drank beer, and played cards, about their religious experience and sang and prayed with them. Then Emma’s ministry began in earnest. She visited prostitutes in brothels and preached the gospel to them. She searched out drug addicts in abandoned buildings on Seattle’s mud flats and helped rescue them from addiction. Every Sunday evening, Emma and L. P. preached at a downtown rescue mission; they also preached in churches across the state of Washington. Both were licenced by the Free Methodist Church as Conference Evangelists, and Emma’s autobiography, Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed, was published by the Free Methodist Publishing House. At her funeral service, ten ministers presided. I always tell the story about the woman who is my personal favourite, Iva Durham Vennard (1871-1945), whose name and story I came across nearly twenty years ago. No sooner had I scratched the surface of my research about her than I found myself discovering many intersections between her life and mine: Methodists from birth, both participants in egalitarian marriages (hers nearly a century ago), mothers, teachers, fierce advocates for women in ministry. I was further hooked when I discovered the love story of her courtship with Thomas Vennard, who wrote a letter in the early 1900s, in which he pledged to be her “background of support” if she would marry him, according to her biographer, Mary Ella Bowie. The hook dug even deeper when I read his words, “I may be the janitor of an institution of which you are principal founder and controlling head” (1947, 98). His comment turned out to be prophetic. True to his word, Thomas sacrificed his successful architectural career in the Chicago Loop in order to oversee, at minimal cost, building renovations at the religious training school she founded, Chicago Evangelistic Institute. Even in the early twentieth century, when women’s activities in the church were restricted to a narrow sphere, Vennard insisted that the time had arrived for women to step up and out in Christian service. She wrote: The nineteenth century will stand out in history as “the discoverer of woman” and it is for the womanhood of this twentieth century to prove what this discovery shall mean. No longer cramped by the old time notions of a

84

Chapter Six woman’s very narrow sphere (italics mine), our girls today find wide open doors for culture and education and travel. They may enter business if they choose, and the professions are inviting them. But in no realm of activity does the door swing wider than to Christian service. The Church is recognizing the necessity of the labor of trained, capable, spiritual women, and today she offers a magnificent opening for her consecrated daughters. (8)

Vennard devoted every area of her life—family, church, vocation—to developing “consecrated daughters” to preach the gospel. She and Thomas raised a family and worked together on the educational institutions which they both believed God had called her to found and lead. She actively supported women’s ordination by joining the American Association of Women Preachers and serving on its executive board. She was issued a local preacher’s licence by the Methodist church. Twenty years later, Vennard remains the epitome for me of a pioneering woman in ministry. When God’s call to ministry came to her unexpectedly as a student at Wellesley College, she committed herself to prayer for discernment and consulted the minister who had been present at her conversion. When she accepted the call, she devoted herself entirely to religious work. When opposition from Methodist clergymen arose against the religious training school she founded in St. Louis in 1902 and against her personally for being, in the words of one opponent, “a dangerous and powerful woman,” she tried relentlessly to dialogue with them, listen to their critiques, and invite them to participate in the school. When she could not overcome the clergymen arrayed against her, she did not give up. Instead, with her young son and her husband, she moved three hundred miles away to Chicago and started over, founding a new training school from which many men and women in the Wesleyan family received Biblical and theological training to be ministers, evangelists, missionaries, musicians, Bible teachers, and deaconesses. Stories about women like Cagle, Ray, and Vennard—only three among thousands of other women who persevered against opposition from family, church and society to follow God’s call into religious leadership within American Christianity— provide a wonderful conduit for adjudicating discussions of how women and men have faced the challenges of uniting Christianity and feminism in their lives and communities.

Step Four: Engage in conversations In addition to understanding my students’ backgrounds, encouraging them to comprehend their worldviews, and telling them stories, I engage

Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom

85

with students in countless conversations. These conversations, sometimes in class, often outside of the classroom in my office or on email, cover all sorts of ground about women in ministry, male headship, women’s submission, gender roles, and Biblical authority. For many students, ideas and opinions that they are hearing for the first time have to be processed, questioned, debated, even meditated on. Eugene Peterson’s discussion of the Hebrew verb, hagah, which is often translated into English as “to meditate,” is helpful here in creating space to process transforming ideas. This verb can also be translated as to growl as in this verse: “As a lion or a young lion growls [meditates] over his prey […]” (Isaiah 31:4). To illustrate what hagah means, Peterson (2006) tells a story about his dog who growled over a bone for many days. The dog chewed on the bone, buried it, then dug it up only to chew on it some more, buried it again, and repeated the process over and over. He concludes by explaining the significance of meditating as growling, “But ‘meditate’ is far too tame a word for what is being signified. […] when Isaiah’s lion and my dog meditated they chewed and swallowed, using teeth and tongue, stomach and intestines” (2). When students “growl” over these issues, I offer to have conversations with them, to accompany them as they process and consider. I don’t give answers. Instead, I listen, offer feedback, and provide support and resources. I recognize that these conversations can be quite unsettling, as a student described in these journal entries shared with me: God—I think I’m a feminist. Actually, I know I am. Some of this reading is somewhat depressing—please help me not to become bitter, but to use my knowledge and awareness for good. Teach me your ways God. Help me find inspiration in the Scripture. At times, I find it overwhelming and daunting. Show me how to be humble and choose my words wisely. I implore you to give me wisdom, discernment and knowledge to act rightly. Teach me the habit of choosing love and mercy. Bridle my tongue and my ruthless emotions. Teach me to relate to others more intimately that I might model your light. God—the more I learn and experience, the less equipped and more confused I find myself, especially about women’s rights. Show me how to express my views judicially and tactfully, yet still be effective and competent in my speech. Again, I wait for your doors to open. I am feeling more passionate each day. […] “God has shown you what is good; and what does the Lord require of

86

Chapter Six you but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8

Four days later, there was this entry: Breakdown today. It’s been a rough week. I’m brokenhearted. God, it’s truly amazing how you’ve shown me in the past few weeks that my true passions lie in gender studies. Make me committed to the cause and show me where to direct my energies. I want to be radical. Help me understand both men and women according to your word, will and the cries of my own heart. I praise you for the beauty in the world and in my life. Teach me to fight injustice boldly and convincingly. If you choose to use me, I accept.

More than a decade ago, my university adopted the motto, “Engaging the culture, changing the world.” While some of my colleagues poke fun at the daring claim, I find it to be true, at least to an extent. Inside and outside the classroom, we do engage the culture of our students, who in turn bring with them the culture of their family, church, and country. As we interact with, cajole, and question each other, these multiple cultures collide and conflict, as this student expressed. In the midst of the dissonance, this student, like many others, discovered that Christianity and feminism can be compatible, and they then take that understanding into the post-college world. The impact can be astounding for the student who wrote those journal entries while my Introduction to Christian Theology class now works with an organization dedicated to the building up of young girls’ self-esteem. Through this work, this student does indeed hope to change the world. Facing the pedagogical challenges of Christianity and feminism in the college classroom is daunting yet exhilarating. It keeps me on my toes. It helps me stay connected to students’ worldviews and to remain transparent about my own. It provides a platform for robust class discussions. It encourages students to be honest with themselves and with each other. Finally, it invites reflection on the lives of those who have persevered in Christianity and feminism and shown us the way forward—together.

Bibliography Bowie, M. E. Alabaster and Spikenard: The Life of Iva Durham Vennard, D.D. Founder of Chicago Evangelistic Institute. Chicago: Chicago Evangelistic Institute, 1947. Cagle, M. L. The Life and Work of Mary Lee Cagle: An Autobiography. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene Publishing House, 1928.

Challenges of Christianity and Feminism in the College Classroom

87

Clark, S. B. Man and Woman in Christ. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1980. Freitas, D. Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Guthrie, S. Christian Doctrine, rev. ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994. Ingersoll, J. Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Johnson, E. A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 2001. Kostenberger, A. J. God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation, 2nd ed. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004. Palmer, P. The Promise of the Father; or, A Neglected Speciality of the Last Days. Boston: Henry V. Degen, 1859. Peterson, E. Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eedrmans, 2006. Redfern, C. and K. Aune. Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement. New York: Zed Books, 2010. Riswold, C. “Conversations and intersections: A third-wave feminist approach to gender, Christianity, and theology,” in Sex, Gender, and Christianity, ed. Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. Roberts, B. T. The Right of Women to Preach the Gospel. Rochester, NY: B. T. Roberts, (n.d.). Tangenberg, K. “Women’s Mentoring on Christian Campuses: Balancing Tensions of Faith, Feminism, and Femininity,” Paper presented to the Lilly Fellows Seminar on Gender and Christianity, Seattle Pacific University, 2010. van Leeuwen, M. S. Gender & Grace: Love, Work & Parenting in a Changing World. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990. Vennard, I. D. “An appeal to young women.” Inasmuch 2 (November), 1906.

CHAPTER SEVEN “I CAN’T BE YOUR PRINCESS:” FACING THE CHALLENGE OF SEXISM IN STUDENT LIFE IN CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION JEFF BOLSTER

I serve as the Dean of Students at a private, Christian, liberal arts university in Southern California. A few weeks ago, a sophomore student came to meet with me. She was the president of one of our clubs and wanted to raise funds for a local charity. At our meeting, she presented her idea about fundraising and wanted to know if, as an incentive for the student body reaching a certain goal, I would agree to dress up like a princess, walk out on stage in one of our chapel services, and then remain in costume, walking around the student commons for a few hours afterwards. As is the case in many conversations with college students, I could hear her genuine intent and her admirable purpose, even though the princess idea was fraught with problems. I explained to her that the princess concept could potentially offend people, that the idea of dressing a man up like a woman as a means of pseudo-embarrassment could send a bad message: “We’re using your gender to embarrass my gender.” Our conversation went on for a while, and we had a great discussion about gender stereotypes, alternative ideas for fundraising, and her time at college thus far. In the end, I was able to say with a smile, “I can’t be your princess,” and she was able to tell me that she’d never thought of “this stuff” in that way before. One of the main reasons I was ready for this conversation with this student was because of the conversations I have had about gender and feminist theory with friends, colleagues, and scholars—specifically, around the subtle and often missed or dismissed use of everyday

90

Chapter Seven

expressions, slang, or well-intended sarcastic quips that have gendered connotations. Early on, friends and colleagues pointed out these occasional uses and misuses in my life. My participation in the life of our campus exposed me to even more resources, thought, and practical day-to-day applications of feminist theory and praxis. In particular, Being Feminist, Being Christian, Essays from Academia (Jule and Pedersen ) offered a profound and insightful introduction to the world of feminist theory. It was personal work and awareness first, and then a realization that feminism offers an array of tools for facing the challenges of student life in Christian higher education. Too often, the extent of our knowledge of young adult development theory is summed up in the statement, “When I was in college…,” and it is an understatement to say that things change profoundly from one college generation to the next. We need a much more contextually developed approach to student life than nostalgia. Recently, I have been putting forth the idea that our work in higher education is best done when we embrace young adult development theory, when we collaborate and listen to each other, and when we pay attention to our own experiences and instincts. This powerful triad of theory, collaboration, and experience equips us for the challenging work of mentoring, it safeguards us from relying too heavily on any one particular aspect or perspective, and it is made powerfully redemptive when informed by feminist thought and practice. One of the most important researchers in the field of young adult development is Jeffrey Arnett and his work on the theory of Emerging Adulthood (J. J. Arnett, Emerging Adulthood. A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties and J. J. Arnett, Emerging Adulthood. The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties). The importance of his ideas of working with our students is easy to understand in terms of their actual time on our campuses. What is continuing to be communicated to us in a number of ways is how vital our shared work is once they leave us. Arnett and other theorists are wrestling with development in young adult years, especially what happens in the decade after college. So much of what we do know seems to be about preparing our students to begin the road to adulthood. Arnett has presented a new conception of development for the period of the late teens to early twenties, with a particular focus on 18- to 29-year-olds, citing five main features/norms of emerging adulthood. When considered in light our work with students, Arnett’s writings are informative and important. According to Arnett, this stage of emerging adulthood is an age of identity explorations, an age of instability, a self-focused age, an age of feeling in between, and an age of possibilities.

The Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education

91

In other words, the work of the transition to adulthood is just beginning when they leave us. This means that many of these interventions, lessons, conversations, and ideas will only begin to take place or be planted during their college years, but they will flourish much later. This understanding makes a difference in our work, as it means we must be very present and centered, and at the same time have an eye to the future. Such complex and significant endeavors can only be undertaken with a dependence on the ongoing work of Christ, and a desire to live congruently and responsively. We have been posing this approach in the form of a question for our students: “Who am I becoming in Christ?” So, the work of Christian higher education is at its best when it is done in a holistic collaboration that integrates what students are learning in their classes and the way they live together in the community life of a residential campus. In my setting, the campus is a Christian liberal arts one. From the math to the art departments, from the gym to the theatre, my campus has daily potential for the lived experience of our students to be distinctly Christian, and in that to be holistic. To achieve this holistic student development, it is vital that students, faculty, staff, and administrators live in community with each other, and engage in dialogue that is informed, grounded, authentic, curious, and Christian. As we accompany our students on their journey through their undergraduate years, our hope is the development of their whole persons as they discover who they are, who they are becoming in Christ, and how their lives in Christ ought to shape their understanding of gender and their treatment of women and men. As a Dean of Students, my work is that of Student Life, by which I mean to include a wide array of domains and people working in areas referred to as Student Life, Spiritual Development, Campus Life, Campus Ministries, Student Development, and/or other similar units. A lot of this life takes place when students are not in the classroom, but the realities of life in and out of the classroom are intimately woven together, though the stitching isn’t always obvious. Collaborative relationships and alliances between faculty, staff, and administrators serve as an important means for stitching together these domains of students’ college life and experience. These relationships can be hard to cultivate because of the myriad tasks that demand the attention of university faculty, staff, and administrators, and that interfere with the time it takes to cultivate face-to-face interactions. Further, when difficulties need to be addressed, these relationships can be a challenge to cultivate because of our aversion to the inevitable conflict that arises within authentic relationships. Still, these relationships are crucial to the

92

Chapter Seven

best practices in mentoring student life, and ideally these alliances should precede specific situations or incidents that arise in students’ lives. If they do, they can foster a uniform set of expectations across multiple domains of university life and a positive context for deep life learning to take place as well—learning that students will take with them well beyond their college years and that will continue to shape their lives in profound ways, long into the future. In particular, how our students work with and across gender is a vital life skill relevant to friendships, dating, marriage, career, family, church, and numerous other venues. Student Life practitioners will tell you that most of the job is expecting the unexpected. Since no dean can be a content expert on everything that will arise in the course of her or his work—from family systems, to group dynamics, to eating disorders, to gender roles, to financial planning, to exercise, to human psychology, to theology—the realities and complexities of our students’ lives necessitate these deep, healthy, and adaptive partnerships across the campus. At our best, the Christian college experience offers a mentoring community for our students, and I owe most of my framework for college as a mentoring environment to the work and research of Sharon Daloz Parks. Parks has clearly articulated this idea of college as a mentoring environment, contending that effective concepts and practices of mentoring should embrace and respect the classically understood term of mentor while realizing, in her words, “that a network of belonging that serves young adults as a mentoring environment may offer a powerful milieu and critical set of gifts in the formation of meaning, purpose, and faith” (Parks, 127). Simply put, our students have the best opportunity at developing as followers of Christ when they do so in the context of our mesh of supportive, informed, and authentic mentoring relationships. The spectrum of challenges in student life is broad, and issues connected to gender abound. I have found that gender studies and feminist theory offer practical interventions and solutions across the broad spectrum of student life in Christian higher education. In this essay, I elevate roommate conflict, mentoring, and then hazing as three examples of challenges that student life personnel have faced by using the wisdom, opportunity, and praxis found in feminism to help them productively navigate these challenges.

The “Who-Moved-My-Milk?” Conflict Roommate conflicts are often holy opportunities for our students to figure out what it means to live in community. The students don’t often

The Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education

93

see it in these lofty perspectives, but conflict is rich in opportunities to learn from each other. As our staff has worked more seamlessly across gender, our male and female Resident Directors have been able to learn from each other on approaches and solutions to these conflicts—and we’re rarely short on roommate conflict. Nearly every year in the fall semester, I receive a phone call from our President’s office, informing me that a parent has contacted their office because the son or daughter of the parent is mired in a major roommate conflict. In my first few years as Dean this was an alarming call, mostly because I am usually up to speed on any major roommate conflicts. According to our protocol, I immediately call the Resident Director (RD), our staff person who lives in the dorm and works with our student Resident Assistants (RAs) and our student residents. In almost every case the RD is also surprised because she or he hasn’t heard about the conflict. The RD then contacts the student RA, who lives on the floor with the students and who is also usually surprised about not having heard about the roommate conflict. Within hours, we have set up a meeting for the two roommates, the RA, and the RD in order to find out what is causing the conflict. The most memorable of these types of conflicts was one in which a student told us that his roommate was not putting the milk carton back in the right spot in the refrigerator. The roommate was not drinking the milk; he was just moving it and then not returning it to the correct spot. When we asked the student if he had shared his concern with his roommate, he said no. When we asked him why not, he replied, “Well, I just didn’t want it to turn into a big deal.” This humorous story strikes a chord of truth regarding our dealings with conflict. Even when the conflicts or issues are small, we see just how connected our responses in the small matters are to our responses (or lack thereof) in the big ones, and it is this continuum connecting the small and big matters that has come to be profoundly important in the way I understand the student experience. Mentoring has become a foundational approach to our work that is significantly influenced by gender studies and feminist theories. Our student life staff, namely our resident directors, work with male and female student leaders. We took the job description of the RD and prioritized the mentoring work of the RDs with the student RAs. We began to have RDs develop deeper relationships with the RAs, asking them about their own journeys of faith, vocation, family, romance, identity, and a host of other issues. Rather than just training them on how to “be there” for their students, we were and are there for them. The goal in implementing this change is to create an authentic and shaping relationship. RDs meet regularly with RAs in a one-to-one setting to

94

Chapter Seven

discuss the job, but also to discuss life. As we worked with this mentoring model, we began to see a more focused approach. The RD mentors the RA, sharing insight, resources, perspectives, and ideas. The RA is naturally more motivated and receptive, as it’s a role s/he has chosen. The resources are stewarded more effectively, and then flow into the lives of the students with whom the RA lives and works. Further, a unique and important element to this approach is that most teams have male and female student RAs. Gender differences, approaches, defaults, and perspectives are often named and dealt with in real time by both men and women working together. Just this year one of my female RDs had to sit with one of her male RAs and talk with him about his flirting with female RAs during meetings. Our speculation was that it was a coping mechanism for his nervousness, and it proved to be true. The young man accepted the invitation to move beyond his one-way, flirtatious approach to women and see and treat them (and himself) with dignity and respect. It’s a discipleship model that is easily but not often replicated. These mentoring relationships and conversations are a vital aspect of the landscape of Christian higher education experience. How many of us have the story from our college years about a member of faculty or staff who connected with us, asked that question, made that point, offered that experience? It took several years of challenging and resisting what we didn’t want, while simultaneously cultivating more and more of what we did want on campus to accomplish our goals. We put hazing and harassment on a spectrum of sexist behavior, ranging from the smallest insinuation or comment to the more headline making actions seen in the national press. Most of what we see is on the low end of that spectrum, but it is connected nonetheless. This approach gave voice and opportunities for our students to express what they wanted, what the purpose of an oncampus experience should be.

A “Boys Will Be Boys” Dorm Climate My reflection on the power of gender, the ideas of feminism, and other related concepts was ignited by a crisis here on our campus about eight years ago. It was the fall of 2006, and my second month on the job as Dean of Students. Part of my responsibilities includes, as it did then, the oversight of our Residential Life program. We house over 1700 traditional undergraduates here on the main campus. On the first day of classes in 2006, I received a call from a woman in Northern California. Her daughter was dating a freshman attending our university, and they had received an odd call very early that morning. He lived in our first-year dorm, which is

The Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education

95

poised on the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean. He called and told his girlfriend that his entire floor had been forced to swim naked in the ocean that night. I immediately began to contact our dorm staff, and we launched a full scale investigation into this story. What we found was deeply disturbing, but also the beginning of significant healing and culture change in our dorm culture. We had young men who had been given significant positions of influence with very little accountability or mentoring. The culture had devolved into a well-intended but toxic and sexist environment. As it turns out, the dorm had a tradition of going “Naked Ocean Swimming” aka “NOSing” on the night before classes began. What we would come to find out is that when the “NOSing” began eight years prior, it was a good-natured, voluntary event in which just a few friends who lived in the dorm together participated. Unfortunately, each year the event picked up detrimental momentum, and in eight years, the student hall leadership was facilitating the event, and the entire dorm was forced to take part. The dorm was a four-story building, and at the appointed time, hall leadership for the first floor woke the residents and walked them down the cliffs to the ocean where they were told to strip naked and jump in. Upon completion, the now initiated freshman students joined in and went to the second floor, where hall leadership commenced activities for that floor. Second floor was marched to the ocean, told to get naked and jump in the ocean. That group of young men now joined in as the band moved to third floor. By the time they reached the third and fourth floors, the event was gaining momentum and descending into chaos. With the addition of a bunch of wet, adrenaline-filled freshmen, the escalation of peer pressure was inevitable. In the days and weeks following the event, we interviewed every freshman in the dorm, each student leader, and all the on-site staff. They were intelligent, kind, well-meaning, and shocked when we began to talk with them about the realities of issues related to sexual harassment, hazing, and assault. We focused in on the eight young men who were serving as Resident Assistants in the dorm. It was clear that some of their identity was rooted in the dorm culture, and while that culture had many positive things to offer residents, there was also a current of immature, somewhat hostile, and detrimental traditions.

Deconstructing the “Boys-Will-Be-Boys” Culture That first year of shifting this “boys-will-be-boys” culture was the organizational equivalent of triage in an emergency room. We began to work with the students who had perpetrated the hazing to carve out a new

96

Chapter Seven

and clear purpose for the dorm that was connected to the mission of the university. It would be respectful, kind, fun, challenging, and centered on Christ. We lost some staff and some student leaders who weren’t in agreement with our new vision of dorm culture. Overall, it was a redemptive process, with plenty of successes and plenty of resistance. I have seen that in issues related to sexism and gender differences and assumptions, too often and tragically people’s defensiveness prevents their growth. What we experienced in those days was the power of a good question, the power of a conversation, and the power of mentorship. One of the most powerful interventions in establishing a greater consciousness about sexual harassment and hazing was our hiring of a new Resident Director who would live in the dorm and take up the day to day leadership needed there. He was a graduate from our university, had been an RA in this particular dorm, and was now serving on staff at a church in Southern California. He and I had worked together on our university shortterm mission program, and I had a deep hunch that his skill set was exactly what we needed in terms of addressing the dorm culture change we were seeking. Having been an RA in this dorm several years prior, he was acquainted with some of the activities, but much earlier in their lifecycle. The current RAs and dorm residents needed a strong, mentoring presence to significantly alter the culture of their dorm; however, the shape of that change for the first few months looked quite different than one might expect from a mentor. The new RD held these young men accountable. The dorm was so rowdy at night that he started sleeping in the lounges, regularly getting up between midnight and 3:00 am to respond to noise, pranks, and low-level harassment The default setting of those he confronted and their supporters was, “Well, this is what guys do,” and we pushed back against that understanding whenever we could by suggesting alternatives, demanding accountability, and engaging in re-imagining what it meant to be a man on our campus, not just a guy in this dorm. Students in the dorm started calling him “Robo-RD,” and we began to see the culture changes begin. They were small at first, but once we broke away from the “boys-will-beboys” behaviours and created some healthy, safe, and appropriate behaviour expectations for these young men that did not tolerate gender demeaning language or intimidation in the dorm, all kinds of young men began to grow and thrive there. That was over eight years ago now. The amount of deep culture change in that dorm and across campus has been significant, and much of the credit goes to this RD who took a feminist consciousness-raising and theologically incarnational approach to his role and work in Student Life.

The Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education

97

The second strategy we used was collaboration with another student life professional. I reached out to a friend and colleague from my graduate program who works in the field of Human Resources and is an expert on the subject of sexual harassment. As she consulted for us, she layered in some additional research on the topic of hazing and sexual harassment, and in the launch of the next school year, we began our annual LEAD Week training for our 350+ student leaders on campus by addressing the topics of hazing and sexual harassment from the outset. We put all the issues we had confronted—hazing, demeaning gender language, pseudosexualized behaviours—on a continuum to begin the process of changing the consciousness in our student leaders about the gendered and hostile nature of these activities. We began by pointing out that while you might never envision yourself forcing someone to strip naked and swim in the ocean as part of a dorm tradition, you might envision yourself, your roommate, or your friends calling a person a “bitch” as a joke. As we knew, it was easy to be dismissive of an issue or behaviour when you couldn’t find your own connection to it, but once you could see a connection on some kind of a continuum of behaviour, change would be possible. At this point it became possible for us to show these student leaders that calling someone a “bitch” is on the same spectrum of demeaning, insulting, gender-based hostility as other more egregious behaviours—hazing being only one of them. We learned that when it comes to these hazing and harassment-based issues, we need to speak into their lives early and often. We discovered through the interviews, research, and consulting that often students who have experienced hazing or harassment will choose to forget it and will shut out the trauma they experienced in favour of remembering only the bonding that they now know. Once the participants of the hazing or harassing behaviours have made these mental and emotional manoeuvers for themselves, they can then recreate the same event and behaviours for others, often intensifying the harassment with the idea that more bonding will result. We were able to trace this very phenomenon in the NOSing tradition back through the eight years it had taken place. Sadly, we learned how each year more and more harassment was piled on to the new batch of incoming male students and was justified in the name of dorm initiation and with the intent of fostering community, brotherhood, and dorm identity. Indeed, this dorm on our Christian college campus was essentially a fraternity rivalling the kinds of behaviours our students and staff would criticize as harassment elsewhere. While fraternities do create male bonds and friendships, they do so by normalizing gender-hostile

98

Chapter Seven

behaviours, language, and values—none of which are consistent with our understanding of what a Christian commitment means. We continued to question a “boys-will-be-boys” attitude every chance we could. We worked with the young men to get at what their desired outcomes actually were. They talked about a desire for connection, intimacy, community, and challenge even though a lot of the activities they used to create these feelings were tantamount to a thirsty man drinking saltwater. Saltwater looks like freshwater, but it isn’t, and drinking it only harms rather than helps. We continued to raise consciousness in our conversations around gender, respect, and power, and we invited a deeper consideration of each of these in light of what being a Christian in these domains might, or ought, to mean. Our conversations included generating ideas and opportunities for positive alternatives to these harassing behaviours, justifications, and ideas in the first place. As we knew, if talking about a moved milk container was difficult for roommates to do and had to be facilitated, talking about hazing and its connection to sexual harassment would need to be made conscious and facilitated even more so. Our residential life culture has made positive, inclusive, fun, relevant, and Christ-centred changes since addressing this hazing/harassment event. Staff and students have taken up purposeful leadership, and we’re seeing the compounding results in small but significant ways. On the one year anniversary of the incident, I watched as over 150 male and female first year students and their leaders paddled into the ocean, in the bright light of day, all dressed up in goofy costumes and using kids’ pool toys. This event was a redemptive, silly, fun event that staff and faculty participated in alongside the freshmen, and that replaced the hazing tradition completely. In the years since that first replacement event, we’ve seen several different and equally positive iterations of it as well.

Further Opportunities and Impacts Other opportunities and evidences of the widening impact these feminist-minded changes in our mentoring models for residential life have surfaced over the eight years in which we have been at work to change our culture. At one point in our restorative and reformative work, I was giving a workshop on hazing and harassment to a group of student leaders. I saw a group of female students discussing something and asked them about it. They described how they didn’t like walking down our campus mall after chapel because several groups of young men would sit and watch as female students walked by. It was no shock to me to hear them comment

The Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education

99

on this phenomenon since even I was aware of the gauntlet-like feel to the campus mall after chapel. I asked these young women students what it would look like to take back the mall, rather than circumvent it as they were currently doing. I received some puzzled looks. I asked them to consider the possible effects of two or three of them approaching these young men and saying, “Guys, we assume the best here, but, the way you are standing here, makes it look like you are just checking out girls; we know you wouldn’t want that for you or for us.” The women student leaders laughed at first, but the rest of the seminar attendees erupted in applause and many affirmed that they had felt it too. About 75 of them were there that day, and committed to using this conversation approach to confronting this sexist behaviour in some of the male students. A few weeks later, I heard from several groups who had actually initiated these conversations, and they said the approach worked, and the groups of men students stopped congregating and staring at the women students. In the last few months, media outlets of all kinds have been raising the topic of the Violence against Women Act (VAWA). VAWA was enacted by Congress in 1994, under the leadership of then Congressman Joe Biden. This fall, the US Department of Education published their final regulations for VAWA, with amendment to the Clery Act. The Clery Act is also administered by the Department of Education, and requires colleges and universities to keep and disclose information about crime on and near their respective campuses. The changes are primarily related to expanding the rights of campus survivors of sexual assault, as well as survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. Woven into much of the coverage are stories of colleges and universities who have made egregious choices in the wake of sexual assault. There are stories of victims who have been disregarded, perpetrators who have been given a pass, and students who have been falsely accused and then never exonerated. In my experience with my colleagues who have responded to these incidents from schools of all sizes, most institutions have a tremendous commitment to caring for and supporting victims, to fully disclosing their processes of support for victims, and to ensuring fair and just investigations and resulting sanctions or legal actions for victims and those accused. Here again we must accept our potential place on the continuum of these responses. I am confident and proud of the systems of care, response, and reporting that are in place at our university when it comes to the issues of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. I have the same sense of confidence in many other institutions of Christian higher education. I am also aware that what prevents these issues from being

100

Chapter Seven

firmly and adequately addressed is the quality of the mentoring community in these institutions. Christian universities need a web of education, candid discussions, preventative programming, multi-disciplinary perspectives, and personal stories if we are to honestly and adequately address these issues of harassment and assault. We also need multiple voices that appeal to who we are as a Christian community. We believe that God is at work, that any sexist attitude or behaviour is not God’s design for our interactions, and that we have the opportunity to tune into the work of eradicating sexism in all its forms and wherever we find it. This opportunity includes helping students to see the connection between a bikini poster in a dorm room and a sexual assault. Both are on a spectrum of objectifying women which leads to violence against them, and we must continue to educate our students in and out of the classroom about these dehumanizing connections. These conversations about the objectification of women are far more common than conversations about rape, but both are vital to raising consciousness about these manifestations of sexism. Our staff and student leaders are now ready, willing, and equipped to walk into a freshman dorm and have extended conversations about the connections between objectifying women and abusing them, and thus, about why we “don’t do” bikini posters in our dorms. In those conversations, we work to raise the students’ consciousness about the kind of values that permeate our culture’s view of women, men, gender, and sexuality. We also appeal to the nature and values of who those young men are now as college men and of who they want to become as adult Christian men. These are the conversations, chapel messages, lectures, and casual but gracious encounters that are powerful interventions into the lives of our institutions and that help to overturn forms of sexism that seem innocuous and, as such, help to normalize a sexist culture and climate in our institutions, Christian or otherwise. I experienced one of these moments early in my graduate work, when I walked into a small group meeting for one of my classes. There were five of us in the group, and I was the only male. As I entered the room, I greeted my fellow students by saying, “Hi guys….” My friend and colleague in the group looked at me with a smile and said, “Hi Jeff. Funny greeting since you are the only guy.” Her spirit was kind, informative, and gracious, but still sent a consciousness-raising message about my unconscious language. The timing of her words was powerful, in that it arrived during the early weeks of unwinding the hazing incident. The consciousness-raising connections were not lost on me. As followers of Christ who are continuing to work to improve the culture for women and men on our campus, we have leaned further into

The Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education 101

addressing conflict by cultivating student voices. This practice is known as “bystander training.” It is founded on the idea that as a witness to an offensive incident, no matter how small or large, individuals have the opportunity—and frequently the obligation—to speak out on behalf of the person who has been offended. Curiously, our students will often talk themselves out of saying something in the moment, and this behaviour is exactly what bystander training seeks to change. Rather than relying on a dean or director of student life to confront students, we are training our RAs to engage in conversations with their peers, essentially in the same way that I encouraged the women to use a conversation-approach to reclaim the campus mall as a place to walk without their physical attributes being sized-up by their male peers. In the dorms, when an RA who is walking down the hall hears one male student jokingly call another male student a “chick,” we train the RA to casually, graciously, and succinctly say to that student, “Hey … we don’t really talk like that around here. No need to call someone a chick as an insult.” This bystander training seems to be having positive effects since we are hearing multiple stories that these kinds of moments are being fairly well received. When bystanders deal with this kind of low-level sexism, it clears more space in the campus culture for our students and our institutions to deal with the complexities and challenges of being faithful followers of Christ, who also confront sexism when and where they find it. In turn, we see students grappling with their response to hunger, poverty, racial tension, sex trafficking, homelessness, and many other issues by using bystander training as well. Bystander training that works to eradicate sexism does, however, require trust. Trust that students who have experienced assault will be treated well, trust that students who raise tough issues will be listened to, trust that colleagues will treat each other with authenticity and respect, and trust that sees women and men as valued human beings, especially since Christ has valued us utterly and forever as beloved daughters and sons. This trust is predicated on conversations that are often not easy, but always vital. In our work in student life, we are attempting to cultivate ownership of a positive, safe, and Christ-centered campus deep within student culture that respects women and men and finds no truck with gender-based demeaning language, hostility, or violence. This year I received a rare gift. It was an email from one of the RAs that we fired as we were dismantling the hazing incident eight years ago. He has remained in the area, and we have seen each other from time to time. He is a married father, a teacher, and is always positive and engaging when we meet. Some time ago he sent me the following email, which is a

102

Chapter Seven

tribute to the numerous people who poured a vision of life that resists sexism into this young man’s life: I consider that day that you fired me one of the biggest turning points in my life. You called me out, and I will never forget you [telling] me the negative influence I was having on people that looked up to me. I [had] rationalized my behavior, and convince[d] myself I was a positive role model. That day made me question a lot of things in my life and re-evaluate how my light (or lack there-of) was shining Christ to others. From then on I wrestled with issues, but ultimately sought to have a better lifestyle and be the example I [knew] I could be. I know that year was really tough for you, but I hope you know that even the tough decisions that you made and continue to make are the right ones. Those decisions help your students to mature. You had a big part to do with that. Since then I [have] scooted away from some friendships, attend church, am involved in leading a bible study, have gotten married, and have a sweet little baby girl, all of which I know would not have happened if I did not mature. I turned my back on partying and all sorts of shenanigans that seemed temporarily fun, but were killing me. I feel that I’ve been able to experience more of the life God has intended for me because of this.

I am confident that this young man’s life has been improved and blessed because of our commitment to engage feminist thinking and use it to confront the sexism in our campus culture. I too believe that I am a better administrator, and more importantly a better person because of my feminist friends, scholars, and colleagues. They have helped me deepen my understanding of feminism, along with its implications for my own life. They have also helped me frame, reframe, and interact with the challenges of administrating student life in the college setting. In a time when it seems society would settle for our young people to keep from drinking themselves to death or committing rape, Christian higher education has a much higher calling to live out. It’s a call to holiness. As a colleague of mine wrote, “Holiness is the character of God—Father, Son and Spirit—restored in the people of God, the Church, as they participate in God’s life and redemptive mission in the world” (Benefiel). Together we get the rare and weighty opportunity to walk with and mentor students as they step into adulthood and hopefully into a life of holiness, a holiness that includes choices that contribute to the full flourishing of all human beings, men and women together.

The Challenge of Sexism in Student Life in Christian Higher Education 103

Bibliography Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. “Emerging Adulthood. A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties.” American Psychologist (2000): 469-480. —. Emerging Adulthood. The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Benefiel, Ron. “Languages of Holiness: The Autobiography of a Seeker.” Wesley Center Online. February 2007. http://wesley.nnu.edu/fileadmin/imported_site/wesley_conferences/200 7/Benefiel%20-%20Revisioning%20Holiness%20Lecture.pdf (accessed January 8, 2014). Parks, Sharon Daloz. Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000. Jule, Allyson and Bettina Tate Pedersen. Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

CHAPTER EIGHT INCLUSION OR EXCLUSION?: FACING THE CHALLENGES OF WOMEN’S VOICES IN THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY REBECCA LAIRD

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them. Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say. —Sojourner Truth1

I’ve been hearing voices in my head for decades now—first as an editor of religious books, then as a pastor, now as a university professor who teaches practical theology. Each voice I hear is distinctly familiar. I know the contours of each one’s speech and perspective. These voices come to me when I need them: when I look around the room and see I am once again in the minority—by gender, by age, by theological conviction and occasionally by race. They whisper words of wisdom when I see that familiar look—the one where my theological colleagues, mostly male, or my students, mostly under twenty-one, overlook me or see through me. It’s as if I am not there, but I am. The voices remind me: I am here. My opinions count. My life is a witness. I must stay in the room, remain in the conversation, speak my convictions, listen well, and stay open to those with whom I work and teach. The silenced women of history and elsewhere are counting on me just as much as I am counting on them. I took my first graduate course in religion in 1984. I was twenty-three years old. I did not plan to follow my father’s footsteps into ordained ministry and teaching religious education; I just wanted to know if there were more to faith and religion than the conservative evangelical piety in which I was raised. I practised my faith faithfully, radically even. I

106

Chapter Eight

worshipped in a community-based church with a clear bias toward the urban poor. My free time was spent volunteering at a shelter for homeless families, but I had grown up with Helen Reddy’s song playing through my radio, “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore/And I know too much to go back an’ pretend.” While I found this volunteer work meaningful, I wanted to make bigger, louder changes. I cultivated my public leadership gifts, while the society around me was changing rapidly. Promotions at my workplace—even for women—came readily; the church where I worshipped used inclusive language (not at all typical of my denomination), and we sought to be a place where social and economic boundaries could be named and stepped over. In my professional and worship communities, I felt we were progressing, that time hurried on apace; yet, at meetings of our overseeing denomination, time stood still. Although I was a graduate student of religion working with some of the finest writers on religion and spirituality of the day, the primary questions I was routinely asked were about the ordained men in my family: How’s your father (an ordained minister)? What’s Michael (my husband, also an ordained minister) up to these days? Whole conversations would ensue about their pursuits. Often these conversations would be followed by a pat on the back and the words, “We are so proud of you.” I often could not tell what made them swell with pride: Was it that I made my father and husband look good? Was it that I provided a token reassurance that the church was progressing with its handful of young women in ministry training? Was it because I was validated by persons outside the church for being more than cute, spunky, and talented? It was nearly impossible for me to tell. I was left feeling invisible, patronized, and silenced. In my workplace, when I spoke up, I was mostly heard. In the church, I often was not. Although this dichotomy in my own experience seemed unique, I found I was hardly unusual once I began reading and exploring more widely. I remember the fall evening when I knocked on the door of a house in South San Francisco and joined a meeting of the Evangelical Woman’s Caucus.2 What I heard in that room resonated deeply with Nelle Morton’s description of women’s silencing and finding the strength to insist on being heard: It was in a small group of women who had come together to tell our own stories that I first received a totally new understanding of hearing and speaking. I remember well how one woman started, hesitating and awkward, trying to put the pieces of her life together. Finally she said: “I hurt … I hurt all over.” She touched herself in various places as if feeling for the hurt before she added, “but … I don’t know where to begin to cry,” She talked

Inclusion or Exclusion?

107

on and on. Her story took on fantastic coherence. When she reached a point of most excruciating pain no one moved. No one interrupted. Finally she finished. After a silence, she looked from one woman to another. “You heard me. You heard me all the way.” This woman was saying, and I had experienced, a depth of hearing that takes place before the speaking—a hearing that is far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech—a new speech—a new creation. The woman had been heard to her own speech.3

The powerful instances of making room for the stories of women and others who were overlooked and under-heard were repeated many times over the years. Women who were not always heard in the church were beginning to listen to each other and recognize that change would need to be demanded (ever so politely) if half of the human race was going to have a say in the church we also inhabit. Soon, Carol Gilligan’s (1993) book, In a Woman’s Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, showed up on the assigned reading list for a seminary course. Gilligan made the then-audacious theological and educational claim that “all women aren’t men.” Gilligan critiqued the prevailing moral development theories of Lawrence Kohlberg that posited that women typically don’t reach higher levels of moral growth. Gilligan pointed out that when research is primarily done with male respondents, which then normalizes the male experience (over the female), it should be no surprise that women don’t compare positively. In Gilligan’s theory, women don’t often abstract moral decision-making to individualistic principles. Rather, moral reasoning is done within the web of relational responsibilities and often with the common good in mind, not just the highest good of the solitary individual. She challenged the idea that the ethics of justice trumped the ethics of care, especially when the latter were held by women. In the decades since Gilligan’s book set off a revolution questioning what comprises a moral choice, essentialists have critiqued her gendered assumptions and others have challenged her methods, yet in 2011, thirty years post-publication, Gilligan described the more than 700,000 buyers of her scholarly book as “People whose voices were dismissed [who now] felt heard.” I was among them. In my first years of seminary, I began writing a column for my denominational magazine, which persisted for over a decade under the moniker, In a Woman’s Voice. In retrospect, I see that the column presumed that a woman’s voice would sound different while a man’s voice would continue to sound classically human and normal. Despite the essentialist premise of the column’s title, I know that I made a positive and inclusive impact. Even now, decades later, a number of women and some

108

Chapter Eight

men in my denomination tell me when we meet, “I read everything you wrote.” People in my own subculture who have been dismissed or overlooked saw me as someone who spoke for them and noticed variant views. This push to give voice to those unable to speak or to those able to speak only haltingly persisted. A few years later, in a book I co-wrote on a faith-based recovery program, one of the women participants reinforced the importance of telling the truth through story, even if the stories are of hard realities. By listening to the story of another, a mirror to one’s stronger self can sometimes be glimpsed: I believe most of the brothers and sisters who come into Glide [United Methodist Church] and gain recovery do so because of what someone who sat next to them or across from them said. When they hear their story being told by someone else, each one comes to realize there are many me’s. I lived my whole life feeling I was the only one who had this pain or coped with it like I did. But there are many me’s. 4

As my graduate coursework headed me towards my thesis, I wrote papers extolling my Wesleyan/Holiness tradition’s long history of ordaining women, but when I was asked where one could hear a woman in our pulpits, I sputtered and stuttered. We didn’t have theological objections to women in ministry, but clearly we had cultural ones. In 1908 a full quarter of the clergy in the Church of the Nazarene had been women. At the close of the twentieth century, the percentage had fallen into the low single digits. My thesis advisors, both women clergy in mainline Protestant denominations, pushed me to find my foremothers, locate their stories, and liberate their voices. What did such women know a century ago that we had lost? One of my advisors quoted from the book of Esther to push me to research these stories: “Who knows but that you have come to this task for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14b NIV). And so off to the denominational archives I went. With the help of a gifted male archivist (married to a woman minister), I encountered the stories of Mary Lee Cagle, ordained in 1899. She wrote of her long struggle to respond to a call to preach: On my face before God with tears, I would plead to be released. I knew to go out in this country as a woman preacher would mean to face bitter opposition, prejudice, slanderous tongues, my name cast out as evil, my motives misconstrued and to be looked upon with suspicion.5

Inclusion or Exclusion?

109

Nearing retirement forty years later, after having a hand in the organization of more than twenty-five Holiness congregations in West Texas, she wrote in correspondence to the general secretary of the denomination, What you said about grace to retire gracefully struck me […]. We are queer creatures anyway. I almost had to know it was preach or hell before I would do it, and now when the time is nearing when I will have to quit, the thought of it nearly breaks my heart.6

Cagle and the eleven other women pioneer preachers I met through the research for my thesis (Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene: The First Generation, 1993) taught me that a vocational call to ministry remains a struggle for women or others who do not fit the majority demographic. These early twentieth-century women showed that action precedes clarity of vocation to ministry—all the women did ministry before they were given any official authority, and consequently, much of their work was entrepreneurial and focused outside formal structures. They also showed that to survive and thrive they needed a friend in ministry who did not demand explanations or defences of their right to be who they were but who knew there was strength to be found in numbers. They also claimed religious and prophetic authority to step out where others had not dared. Through study I found my foremothers, and now when I teach classes in Women in Christianity and Introduction to Ministry, I watch with a mixture of wonder and sorrow, as new students discover for themselves amazing pioneering voices from the past. I celebrate each awakening, but I also grieve sometimes. Many students come with cultural openness to women in all professional venues yet battle unspoken hesitancy about women in church leadership. They have seen so few women ministers in the church to emulate. Recently, a young woman athlete came to my office, needing my signature. Before she left she said, I want to talk to you sometime. I love working in the church but I’ve seen [women like] my mom, who works on staff at our church, have it so hard. I’m not sure I want that. Sometimes I think I feel a call, but I don’t want to be open to it. I’m not sure I want to deal with the struggle.

I hear echoes of Mary Cagle in this student’s voice, and I hope I will have a chance to encourage her to listen with an open, courageous heart and to follow God’s call for the sake of the kindom7 now and in the future. I am convinced that this student is ripe to read some of the unknown stories of

110

Chapter Eight

women in her own faith tradition, to discover the tools of resistance, and to uncover examples of courage she will need. The American church historian Barbara Brown Zikmund identifies and describes these emboldening narratives as “hidden histories” that are both a positive recovery and a witness of the church’s impoverishment: Any examination of “hidden histories” is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, learning these stories is disturbing. Preconceptions and assumptions are stretched and challenged. This experience is painful, because these histories show how deeply captive the church is to cultural patterns of ethnocentrism, racism and sexism.8

When I received my first call to a full time pastoral position in a local church it was not in my own denomination but one that valued gender balance on church staffs. Five women associate pastors had preceded me in this church. Each was highly gifted and respected. Never did I have to defend my right to preach. I did have to ask the sound techs to fiddle with the sound system to help my soft voice reach the back row and into the towering ramparts of the gothic sanctuary. I did have to explain to the Roman Catholic family of a couple I was marrying that no other priest would be coming because I was the minister, not the wedding coordinator. Knowing the story of Olive Winchester let me laugh in amusement at the misunderstanding. Winchester was the first woman ordained in Great Britain, the first to receive a divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1912, the first to earn a doctorate from Drew University in 1925, and in 1935 the first (and only) woman dean of the school of theology where I now teach. She had been written up in a newspaper in Glasgow in 1914 because of her role presiding at a wedding ceremony: “At a marriage[…] yesterday, the clergyman who assisted at the ceremony was a lady […]. Yesterday’s wedding was the first at which she had assisted, and probably is the first in Scotland at which a lady minister has officiated.” 9 When a new senior pastor came to the church, he found the respect I had earned from the congregation problematic. By showing genuine interest and care in the spiritual and mundane aspects of people’s lives, visiting them in hospital, counselling and praying with those in trouble, teaching, preaching, organizing and simply consistently showing up, their love and respect for me had grown. I had also served as head of staff during a six month interim period, and during this time the ship of the church had sailed smoothly over some pretty rough waters. In trying to process his discomfort at my deep relational authority with the congregation, the new senior pastor had asked a member of the search

Inclusion or Exclusion?

111

committee, “What’s so special about Rebecca?” The committee member commented that my love for the congregants and God was evident; they knew I could be trusted and was competent. Nevertheless, within weeks of his arrival, it was obvious, I would have to leave. It was clear I had done all I would be free to do at the church. Providentially, as I see it now, I got two phone calls as I was searching for a new place of service. One call came from my alma mater: they had flown me across the country to San Diego for a faculty interview a few months earlier. I hadn’t expected to be offered the job. One colleague had made it plain that the new hire would have to have twenty years of pastoral leadership to be equipped for the task of preparing undergrads for vocational ministry. In his view, my ten years of church work and another decade of workplace ministry, dozens of retreats, workshops, and publications did not count. He wanted me to have followed his path to the professorate. He didn’t understand that there was no woman in the denomination that had the gifts for teaching and leadership, the prerequisite education, and the years of senior pastoral service. That path was not, and is only barely now, possible for women in ministry. In my denomination, and as is the case with men as well, women must be called by local churches to serve. If their names never come to the table, the experience gap can never be closed. The second call came from the dean of the local theological school where I was just completing my doctorate in ministry. Would I serve as an interim while the associate dean was on special assignment? Would I research and initiate a certificate in spiritual formation? The job offered by my alma mater was tenure track while the seminary position was temporary, but a dream of mine. The dean, the first of the women deans in United Methodist seminary, said, “Why not do both? Ask [your alma mater] to wait.” I did as she suggested and stayed three full years at the theological school. It was empowering to work in an office with a gifted dean who led by relationship and influence rather than by domination or privilege. The academic dean was also a woman with exceptional administrative skills and a wide-angle vision who included people and refused to reduce anyone to a problem. These two women leaders taught me how to lead in ways similar to those described by Ada Maria Isasi Diaz, one of the faculty members who put books in my hand and questions in my mind: Leaders must understand that they are only given the opportunity to exercise power by the community and for the community and that, therefore, they have to be accountable to the community. Unless power is understood this way, it will continue to oppress instead of to liberate.10

112

Chapter Eight

It was this very kind of leadership style that had won me credibility during my years at my first full time pastoral post and at the seminary. At the end of those three years, I returned to San Diego to teach at my alma mater. I was one of two female faculty members to join the School of Theology and Christian Ministry that year. Our addition made the ratio three women to seven men. During one early meeting, one of my colleagues objected to a suggestion that our end-of-the year student awards be given with a view to gender balance when grades and overall achievement sorted out the final pool of candidates. He said, “Now that we are equal, we don’t need to do that.” I looked around the room while I tried to decipher his meaning. Did he mean that with the headcount beyond basic tokenism, we didn’t need to think about gender anymore? Was it because several women students had won the award in recent years, or was it because the decades of not ever having a women even considered were now erased? These comments were not solitary ones. They reveal just how little my denomination and many other evangelical traditions— both in the local churches or in their colleges and universities—have truly engaged the feminist critique, and they illustrate how much further we still have to go in Christian higher education to embrace the challenge of listening, valuing, and hiring faculty who sound, look, and may think in divergent ways. We have a ways to go until this is understood as a benefit rather than as an obligation. Other comments have caused me similar distress. When I pointed out that our survey course, Women in Christianity, covers nearly the same material as the Christian Tradition course and suggested it might therefore be a good addition to our General Education core offerings, a colleague replied, “You can’t learn orthodox doctrine from the women,” and he was surprised that I didn’t tacitly agree that women are by nature heretic or heterodox. Teaching theology at a Christian university offers a call to embody Godness in a Christlike, womanly way, but this sentence alone shows the difficulty of the task. God is beyond gender, but the words used by Scripture and in most evangelical colleges remain highly gendered and sacrosanct. When I recently preached nearby and asked for the doxology to be sung in non-gendered language—Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit—the music director refused, explaining he didn’t want to offend anyone. The fact that I have to translate the exclusively male language week-in and week-out to praise my Creator was unimportant. The use of exclusive language did not even register with the music director as a possible offence to other worshippers in the congregation who were hungry for a more inclusive set of images in our shared Christian worship. Eventually,

Inclusion or Exclusion?

113

we found a way to disrupt the singing patterns by changing the tune so I could make the essential point in my sermon, but I realized that even a simple musical request, based on good theology and with Biblical warrant, would nonetheless be controversial. I have been using inclusive language for a quarter of a century, and still words that seek to widen our understanding of our mighty God—who also made women in the divine image—continue to be viewed as controversial. Again, this so-called disruption reveals how little we have engaged basic feminist questions and critique in formative ways. My classes are sometimes hinted at as being “less-academic” because I add narrative papers to engage the students in theological reflection on their own experience of the holy. I face the challenge of walking the line between a pedagogy of action and reflection that I believe leads to faith development and methods that will leave students with theological vocabulary and doctrinal recall. I want them to have both but to know that knowledge with little to no practical application may not influence behaviour or belief. One of my students, who has been in a class with me every year of his college career, complimented me on this two-pronged pedagogy: “Where would we be if we were only formed theologically and not spiritually? What if I couldn’t tell my story of faith or listen to others? It’s good we get you, too.” Dorothee Soelle, twentieth-century German liberation theologian, concluded at the end of her teaching career spent between Berlin and New York City that the core Christian theological questions are not: What do you believe about God? or What do you know about God? Rather, she says the essential question is, Do you live out God?11 or, more clearly perhaps, how does one “behave” because of their faith in God? As I live out my theological vocation in the later decades of my professional life, Soelle’s penetrating question supersedes any of the annoyances or subterranean sexism that continue to erupt in conservative faith-based institutions. The voices that I hear must do more than motivate me. They must move in my limbs and speak in my words, enacting the truth that God has chosen me—female, fallible, glorious, and gifted me— to show up in the world to reflect the divine image. My success will not be in my own notoriety if I am heard, but in the echoes of the voice of God heard through the many unheard witnesses of faith whose stories I seek to retell. Jesus included the voices of women in his ministry and chose women’s voices to announce his resurrection: So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell the disciples. Suddenly, Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to

114

Chapter Eight them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” (Matthew 28:10) 12

The voices in my head won’t ever leave me. The faithful women from the past prod me when I am weary. They give me courage when I would rather quit, and remind me when I begin to forget that the Word that came into the world proclaiming freedom—for all human bodies, minds, and souls—gave me my voice, too. And as long as breath resounds through my body, I will add my voice to the chorus, hoping to be one more voice urging younger scholars and ministers to speak up for the sake of the silenced.

Bibliography Creegan, Nicola Hoggard and Christine D. Pohl. Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy. Westmont, IL: IVP Academic, 2006. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982, 2003. Issai-Diaz, Ada Maria. La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004. Laird, Rebecca. Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene: The First Generation. Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1993. LeCelle-Peterson, Kristina. LiberatingTradition: Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. 2008. Morton, Nelle. The Journey is Home. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Oden, Amy. In Her Words: Women’s Writings in the History of Christian Thought. Nashville: Abingdon, 1994. Reuther, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Stanley, Susie C. Holy Boldness: Women Preacher’s Autobiographies. Knoxville: University of Tennesee, 2004. Soelle, Dorothee. Essential Writings. Dianne Oliver, ed. Marknoll: Orbis, 2006. Zikmund, Barbara Brown and Adair Lummis. Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling. Louisville, John Knox Press, 1998.

Inclusion or Exclusion?

115

Notes 1

Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman”, (speech given at the Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, 1851). 2 The organization is now called the Ecumenical Evangelical Woman’s Caucus— Christian Feminism Today and offers resources and conferences. See www.eewc.org. 3 Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home. (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 202. 4 Cecil Williams with Rebecca Laird, No Hiding Place: Recovery for our Troubled Communities. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992) 47. 5 Mrs. Fannie McDowell Hunter, ed., ‘Mrs. Mary Lee Cagle, “My Call to the Ministry”’ in Women Preachers (Dallas: Berachah Printing Co., 1904), 71. 6 Mary Lee Cagle to E.J. Fleming, December 16, 1938, quoted in Stan Ingersol, “Burden of Dissent: Mary Lee Cagle and the Southern Holiness Movement” (Ph.D. Diss. Duke University, 1989), 284. 7 “Kindom” is a term widely used by feminist writers to highlight the relational and familial nature of God’s family. It is a playful alternative to “kindom” which focuses on a patriarchal social system. See the pioneering work of Rosemary Radford Reuther and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz as examples. 8 Barbara Brown Zikmund, Hidden Histories, (Clevelend, OH, Pilgrim, 1987). 10. 9 Undated, unsigned clipping attached to handwritten notes from the Executive Meeting of the Pentecostal Church of Scotland, dated 5 May 1913. Church of the Nazarene International Archives. 10 Ada Maria Isasi Diaz, La Luche Continues, (Maryknoll, NY:Orbis, 2004), 18. 11 Sarah Pinnock, “A Postmodern Response to Suffering after Auschwitz” in The Theology of Dorothee Soelle (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003) 134. 12 The verse is quoted from the New International Version. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1973, 1978, 1884).

CHAPTER NINE STAYING TOGETHER: BEING A FEMINIST CHURCH LEADER WITHOUT COMING TO PIECES JANE WOOTTON

Introduction As long as there have been churches, women have been found in them, exercising different kinds of leadership. This truism has been documented and analyzed as part of the feminist enterprise to recover women’s voices and stories. Its unveiling has been facilitated by scholarship and popular understanding becoming (slowly and frustratingly, for sure) less blind to the normative white male bias of existing scholarship and more aware of all kinds of diversities. The upsurge in the number of denominations ordaining women in the second half of the twentieth century, now including—significantly— hierarchical traditions as well as those less centrally organized, has brought women clergy into a visibility from which it seems there is no going back. This has been slow to trickle upwards through the ranks. An example of this sluggishness was the move to create women bishops in the Church of England being repeatedly set back, until finally the decision to go ahead with these ordinations was made in 2014. In the Free Churches, while there have been women moderators and presidents, it is only recently that the role of general secretary has been opened to women (de facto; there has been no theological objection and therefore no debate about this). There are countless stories of women in local and senior church leadership, and women operating in sacramental ministry, so much so that these stories can be seen in the context of an emerging historical tradition. I have worked with others in collecting women’s stories over the years as

118

Chapter Nine

part of the editorial team of Feminist Theology1 and, in the past years, through collaboration on, or contribution to, a number of books: Uta Blohm’s (2005) Religious Traditions and Personal Stories, which draws on interviews with women involved in leadership from a number of religious traditions; This is Our Story, which contains articles by feminist scholars and stories from eleven women in different kinds of ministry (Wootton, 2007); Women and Ordination in the Christian Churches: International Perspectives, which comprises the papers discussing women’s ordination (Jones, Wootton & Thorpe, 2008); and This is Our Song, which tells stories of ten women hymn or song writers (Wootton, 2010). These publications were preceded by Daughters of Dissent, the culmination of a project that had its roots in the World Council of Churches Decade, ‘The Churches in Solidarity with Women’. Both the project and the book uncover and critique the narrative of women in ministry in the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Churches of Christ traditions, which contribute to the composition of the United Reformed Church (Kaye, Lees and Thorpe, 2004). I am also personally part of the larger story of women’s stories in the Church as an ordained minister for over twenty years and, more recently, as the director of a program to train both male and female ministers. During the past two decades, I have served as chair, president, or moderator of a number of ecumenical organizations, both national and international, and I have ministered to both rural and inner city churches. What all women’s stories seem to demonstrate is a profound existential struggle at the heart of women’s vocation to Christian leadership. We are called by God to exercise a leadership that has long been a part of the larger Christian experience. Yet, we are taught that women are created to be subservient to men and to live under male headship, that women are the source of all evil, and that we are redeemed only by childbirth and submission. Thankfully, feminist theologians are reading the Bible and Tradition with more open minds and greater critical understanding, but I know from experience how hard it is for women not to internalize the appalling and pervasive patriarchy of the Christian Church. Patriarchal values have also shaped the society in which children are nurtured and who often deeply internalize such patriarchal attitudes. Reflection on my own experience suggests that the casual sexism of adults made it difficult from an early age to maintain my identity as a “clever” or ambitious girl. Until about the 1970s, the girl who made it through all such pressures to gain a place at university would find that the vast majority of

Staying Together

119

scholarship was male. I studied first Classics then Theology and was completely co-opted into these two very patriarchal areas of scholarship. It never occurred to me to question the (almost) completely masculine canon of Greek and Latin classical literature, or the white male norm of theological interpretation. I had to learn the female trick of entering a field that denied my existence, without losing my mind. I almost managed it.

The Struggle In the early 2000s, Uta Blohm interviewed a number of women priests, ministers, and rabbis, and found that internalized misogyny created a huge struggle for many of her respondents. One interviewee describes it in graphic terms: “I had a lot of changing and thinking to do […] I had this terrific dilemma which was a terrible personal dilemma also because as many of my friends would have said, ‘Well you can’t be a minister, you know.’” Through a great deal of work and the patience of friends, she was able “to work through and cope with this terrific inner struggle” which was “very painful emotionally and spiritually and was done over a good few years” (Blohm 2005, 127). What Blohm was encountering was the powerful disintegrating force of a vocation to a ministry that every mainstream voice for two millennia has said is impossible because of what appeared to be the incontrovertible and immutable fact of gender. She was caught in a paradox that many women face: God calls me and God cannot be calling me. The strain on identity and therefore mental and physical health is enormous. While many women in church leadership would not call themselves feminist, it is not uncommon to find that having to face this kind of internal and external battle tends to raise consciousness. Women may assume that their call is genderless, but this is to suppress an essential element of their personality. Part of the process of integration is often the growing awareness of solidarity with other women. What I argue is that while the struggle is real and devastating, the stories that come from women in church leadership in various books, among other sources, demonstrate that the struggle is becoming more manageable through the feminist enterprise of recovering women’s history, developing inclusive theology, and creating pastorally sensitive liturgies; that women therefore need to be equipped to withstand the forces of destruction, and to find their identity in the continuity and solidarity of a female tradition; and, lastly, that this is not, in the end, a struggle for female integration, but a paradigm model for the wholeness of humankind.

120

Chapter Nine

Entering the Lists The generation of women who were ordained in the 1970s and 1980s, before the ordination of women in the Church of England, but many years after the first women to be ordained, were by no means pioneers in ministry, though we rather oddly felt like it at times. We were preceded by generations of women church leaders, largely unknown and unrecognized through the centuries. More recently and more formally recognized, were women in the United States such as Phoebe Palmer in the 1840s’ Wesleyan Holiness Movement as a Methodist evangelist and Antoinette Brown, the first accredited minister in a Congregational church, who was ordained in 1853. In the UK, Constance Coltman was among the first women to be ordained, again in a Congregational church, in 1917. We are celebrating her centenary in a series of events on September 17th (the date of her ordination, which occurred one day before her marriage, so that she was ordained in her own right) each year from 2014 to 2017. Despite this achievement, there were very few women ministers or leaders ordained or recognized in subsequent years. Kirsty Thorpe notes this reality: In 1924, seven years after her own ordination, Constance Coltman wrote: “The torch of women’s ministry even among the Free Churches has often burned very low, but never without kindling another flame to take its place.” She was not to know how fragile the basis of women’s ordination would prove to be among the Free Churches, or of the low ebb to which it would sink at times in the later twentieth century. (Coltman 1924, 112 cited in Thorpe 2007, 48)

But she goes on: “Her confidence in the passing on of the flame has been vindicated” (Ibid.). It was passed on to courageous individual women, who heard the call to preach and minister, and who won through to achieve their vocation, often against the odds. The basis of women’s ordination was fragile, and the flame often sputtered because of the immense pressures on the early women ministers, particularly regarding domestic concerns. Kathleen Hall, ordained in 1931, struggled with the decision to get married: I knew that if I married I would have to leave the ministry—even my teacher friends had to resign when they married. Consequently, when we announced our engagement on New Year’s Day 1937 we faced questions and criticism. Hadn’t I taken vows on my ordination that I was now breaking? […] Some church leaders accused me of letting the side down;

Staying Together

121

hadn’t the critics always said women in the ministry would pack up and get married? (Hendry 1991 cited in Kaye, Lees and Thorpe 2004, 138)

Another woman who faced potent challenges was Janet Webber, who entered training for ministry in 1954 at the age of twenty-two. She was the first woman to be accepted by Cheshunt College, Cambridge. More than her sex, her age caused difficulties with the male students, who “felt threatened by having a woman student on the same terms as themselves.” She writes: “The older women […] could be seen as mother figures, they were different, but I was one of the gang, and yet I wasn’t. I […] wasn’t perceiving myself as a woman, I was perceiving myself as a student in training for ministry” (Kaye, Lees and Thorpe 2004, 62). And yet, she found that she was constantly introduced by her church secretary or deacons, at meetings as “our Lady Minister.” Her response was to purchase and wear a man’s clerical shirt and collar. She explained the effect: “I was no longer their Lady Minister. Now they had a sense of identity, they’d got a Minister, a proper Minister, not this kind of substitute creature” (Ibid., 158, her emphasis). I had no notion of stepping into a company of women ministers when I was ordained in England in 1979, at the age of twenty-seven, having received the call to ministry as a thirteen year old girl. At the time when I received the call, I had never met a woman minister or heard a woman preach. I was aware of the ministry of Reverend Elsie Chamberlain (see Argent 2013), who had been my mother’s minister and had conducted my parents’ wedding, but my call came in the context of hearing only male preachers and knowing only male ministers. When I was ordained, there were still very few women in full time pastoral ministry in Britain. This was thirteen years before the vote to ordain women in the Church of England, and fifteen years before their ordination had an impact on popular culture. At the time, the possibility seemed very remote for most women, and the few Free Church women who were ordained were regarded as oddities—like something out of the distant past, rather than harbingers of a better future. I remember being asked whether I was allowed to marry. I also remember being told earnestly (by an evangelical Anglican laywoman) that no doubt God was temporarily allowing “lady” church leaders because there were not enough real men taking up the calling at the time. It was as if the earlier struggles had never taken place. Once ordained, I was quickly immersed in the ordinary day to day business of church life: marrying and burying, pastoral visiting, and Sunday worship. I had the same battles with the entrenched choir and organist, for example, as any minister in her or his twenties, who wanted

122

Chapter Nine

to nudge a church towards its contemporary era, but these were to do with modern styles of worship, and not, at that stage, connected with gender inclusivity. My choice of hymns (in a congregational church these constitute the congregation’s vocal contribution to the liturgy) may have stretched to “Lord of the Dance,” but I was still inviting congregations to sing of themselves as men and brothers, and model themselves on male Bible characters while worshipping God as King, Father, and Lord. Ironically, the folk revival hymnody of the 1960s and 70s, which supplied the “modern” music of my youth, contributed to the almost complete silencing of women as hymn writers with its repertoire dominated by songs such as “The Family of Man,” and “Fisherman Peter” (see also Wren 1989; Wootton 2010, 170-180),2 and sent a clear message of exclusivity. There were other sinister undercurrents as well. During the 1980s, our local ministers’ “meeting” seemed like a harmless enough affair. However, like others, I quickly learned the kind of game-play and oneupmanship that exists in an all-male professional group, and found myself acting as “one of the boys.” Alas, I soon discovered that I was not “one of the boys” at all, when status and authority really counted. The local ministers also held occasional meetings with a group of local healthcare professionals. Here, there was a mixture of men and women, but the men were all doctors or high level management and the women were nurses or secretaries. Normally, the group would gather informally, with the smaller number of men “talking business” while the larger group of women “chatted” in another part of the room. Once convened, people would sit in those two groups. At first, I naturally remained with my colleagues in the fraternal, only to find that the talk among the males would stop in my presence, and I was frowned out of the conversation. This confused, hurt, and angered me. I was not then experienced enough to tough it out or to join the subversive voices among the women. What was worse, I received not a whisper of support or even understanding from my male colleagues who clearly enjoyed cozying up to the other male professionals and didn’t want me around. In the end, I simply stopped going to the meetings. The process of disintegration was too painful. In a world that allocated different identity and social standing to female and male, I was neither. However, since these early days, I have found myself in this position of being neither female nor male in a variety of church contexts and this has been a positive shift. For example, as moderator of the International Congregational Fellowship and co-chair of its Theological Commission, I have had the pleasure of visiting congregational churches in many parts of

Staying Together

123

the world. Very often my gender has allowed me to engage in female society with an intimacy that would be denied to a male visitor, an experience that is very precious indeed. On the other hand, in many places, my identity as a woman church leader has only been sustainable because I am from outside the culture. A white woman can exercise a leadership based on her ethnicity, which does nothing to challenge patriarchy or empower other women. This is doubly pernicious and very difficult to deal with. I have not found a way of exercising my ministry in these contexts that is simultaneously culturally honest and empowering of women (Wootton, 2012). There have also been also shocks—for instance when I learned that my unexpectedly smooth ride as a speaker at the Ministers’ Conference of the Greek Evangelical Church was due to the fact that my good friend and Greek pastor, Phaedon Cambouropoulos, had not told them that I was ordained. This showed that women in senior positions of leadership were not immune to disintegrating forces. In Greece, I could be accepted as moderator of the International body to which the church belonged (I was speaking at the aforementioned conference about the forthcoming International Conference in Corfu, at which I would be moderator), but not as an ordained woman. At a conference in Korea, where I was inducted as moderator, I was not initially invited on the stage with the male ministers during the conference. (I went up anyway.) The situation changed immediately once I had been officially inducted as moderator, at which point I was warmly welcomed. Similarly, just before the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, during an ecumenical visit to Hong Kong and China in which I participated as moderator of the Churches Commission on Mission, my “rank” was never mentioned. The male members of the party were seated at meetings and meals according to their role and position—the Bishop here, and the Methodist minister here; whereas, the women were seated as a concredentials group—“the ladies.” Other similar stories in the collection, Women and Ordination, speak of women in such senior leadership positions: in the Church of England, in the Salvation Army, and in the Church of Sweden. Many refer to the fact that even in churches where women have full equal participation in principle, in practice they tend to be offered smaller or poorer churches or associate pastorships, without the natural move through a ministerial career to more prominent or better paid positions. Of course, to seek “promotion” or even (in non-hierarchical churches) to mention preferment is deeply suspect, particularly for women.

124

Chapter Nine

Instead of encouraging women in their leadership and/or to rise through the various levels of church leadership, women are often blamed for the disunity and disintegration of the churches. Women’s ordination and leadership is seen as a cause of division rather than as a means of reconciliation and wholeness. The concessions included in the legislation for women priests and, now, women bishops in the Church of England were motivated by: a desire by English Bishops to avoid a repeat of the sharp divisions which had occurred over the first ordinations of women in the Episcopal Church of the USA in the 1970s. […] other ecumenical considerations—notably relations with Rome—clearly acted as a brake on Anglican exploration of women’s ordination. (Jones, Wootton and Thorpe 2008, 4)

In contrast, Catherine Gyarmarthy-Amherd writes from within the Catholic Church, offering a different insight: It would be high time for a new dialogue since the current polarization of views is affecting not only the Church but also all people of faith. The Church should not be a place of dispute but a place for reconciliation […] Women […] wish to share in the work in the vineyards of God as empowered partners using prophetic and ministerial talents, to live their charisms to the full. (2008, 50)

At the heart of all this is a powerful set of disintegrating forces, against which it is very difficult to avoid coming to pieces.

Disintegration: Coming to Pieces The impact of the struggle over centuries for women’s full partnership and authority in doing the ministerial work of the church is a story only now coming to light. Women’s leadership is persistently marked by intense psychological suffering brought about by the power of vocation coming into direct conflict with the internalization of deeply destructive societal and ecclesiastical views of women’s nature. It is not just a question of whether women have the gifts and skills to exercise leadership, but also an existential question of their place in creation. This question is apparent in the lives of a number of prominent medieval women, for example Hildegard of Bingen (1178-1279) and Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.1207-c.1282), both of whom record huge struggles between their calling to leadership and their internalized doctrine about the nature of women. Hildegard says that she was: “driven by the

Staying Together

125

great burden of my sorrows to manifest openly what I had seen and heard. But I was very afraid and embarrassed to make known what I had hidden for so long” (Disibodenberg and Theodoric 1996, 45). Like Hildegard, Mechthild confided in a male confessor, who gave her permission to publish her visions: He instructed me to do what often gives me cause to weep for shame, for I am acutely aware of my own unworthiness, that is he ordered a pitiful woman to write this book out of the heart and mouth of God. Thus this book has come lovingly from God and is not drawn from human senses. (Andersen 2003, 13-14)

Elizabeth Petroff, a researcher of medieval women and their writing notes the persistent theme of internal conflict between a woman’s calling and her sense of what culture will permit her to do: Society told these women that they were not to become spiritual leaders, but divine voices told the women that they must become leaders. And so they did. But it was not easy for them: there is evidence in most saints’ lives that women were internally conflicted over their new roles, and that the church [sic] was often suspicious of or hostile toward their efforts. (Petroff 1979, 3)

But the existential nature of Hildegard’s conflict also appears in her amazing corpus of hymns, where the predominance of female characters (Mary the mother of Jesus, Sapientia (Wisdom) as an image of the divine, and Saint Ursula) sits alongside a romanticised masculine God, and the recognition of Eve as the instrument of destruction. Here is such an example, found in an antiphon to the Virgin: O quam magnum miraculum est quod in subditam feminam formam rex introivit. Hoc Deus fecit quia humilitas super omnia ascendit. Et o quam magna felicitas est in ista forma, quia malicia, que de femina fluxit – hanc femina postea detersit, et omnem suavissimum odorem virtutum edficavit, ac celum ornavit plus quam terram prius turbavit. (Hildegard of Bingen 1998, 120) O what a great miracle

126

Chapter Nine that the king has entered into a submissive female form. God has done this because humility is higher than all things. And O what a great joy there is in this form because evil, which flowed from woman— woman then dispersed it, and all the sweet fragrance of the virtues, she has built up, and has adorned heaven more than she damaged the earth in the past.3

In this antiphon, woman is shown as existentially submissive and, through her primordial actions, as the gateway to evil, but she is also the means by which all that evil is overcome through God. Therefore, “this form” the female form that we share with Hildegard and her sisters, is not to be despised after all, but rather perceived with great joy. It must have been amazing to imagine, to write, and to sing words like this in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The struggle these women faced was not only internal. They faced opposition from their scandalized families, battles to gain respect and recognition in Church and Convent, and eventual silencing in their church communities. In the case of Hildegard, this silencing was literal. She and her sisters were forbidden to sing for a time because of their compassion towards a deceased former excommunicate. But the stories of women like Hildegard have been figuratively (and sometimes literally) cloistered, hidden, and silenced for centuries. In the social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women faced the same silencing and struggle. Zechariah Taft was one of the few to record the biographies of women preachers and ministers, and he records one of the most heart-rending accounts from a woman who understood too late the compromises she had made with the constraints on her ministry. Elizabeth Hurrell preached with the approval of Charles Wesley. Taft notes that she brought many to Christ. However, she seems to have gone through a crisis in her ministry, which led her to bury what he calls her “extraordinary talent” (Taft 1992, 178). Taft offers various reasons for her loss of confidence, among them the possibility that “she sunk beneath the heavy cross connected with the public exercise of females, especially a female of such tender and delicate feelings as she possessed.” Whatever the reason, he relates that: “for some considerable time she was overwhelmed in anguish and distress, little

Staying Together

127

short of black and dark despair,” and he records her words: “I am going to die […] I am entering the eternal world, but all is dark before me: neither sun, moon, nor stars appear. O that I had my time to live again. I would not bury my talent as I have done” (Ibid., his emphasis). Ann Douglas writes about the same period in America, under the title, The Feminization of American Culture. Relating her experience as an author, she notes the difficulties women continued to face throughout the twentieth century: As I researched and wrote this book, I experienced a confusion which perhaps other women scholars have felt in recent years. I expected to find my fathers and my mothers; instead I discovered my fathers and my sisters. The best of the men had access to solutions, and occasionally inspiring ones, which I appropriate only with the anxiety and effort that attend genuine aspiration. The problems of the women correspond to mine with a frightening accuracy that seems to set us outside the process of history. (Douglas 1997, 11)

I also found in the stories collected for This is Our Story, the same inner struggle still evident in the early twenty-first century as women respond to the call to ministry today. Margaret Mwailu, for example, faced almost complete breakdown as a result of denying her calling for many years. Her early ministry was teaching in a Bible Institute in her native Kenya, and she experienced disapproval of her position as a woman teaching male students. Those students would boycott her classes, and her male colleagues encroached upon her teaching and “made life a hell” for her (Mwailu 2007, 162). Her breakdown was related to her refusing to deny her calling and, consequently, suffering the blows of patriarchal rejection. Significantly, the censure she experienced was a race as well as a gender issue: “Some of the leaders who wanted me to stay argued that for many years the church had been accepting young white missionary girls, to teach in bible institutes; how come when it came to a black intelligent woman it was not acceptable?” (Ibid.) Later, as a young bride in England, Mwailu sought work with various Christian organizations, until she came to the turning point: “I broke down; I could not control my tears, they became like a bubbling spring. I went home, and after a day I was admitted to hospital for three weeks” (Ibid., 164). Broken apart by the disjunction between her calling and her own and others’ perception of her gender, she eventually found a tentative self-confidence in taking up the ministry for which God had long intended her.

128

Chapter Nine

Staying Together For Mwailu it was the support of her husband, and also of other women ministers and leaders, that enabled her to break through the paralyzing dichotomy of her identity as a woman called to ministry. Women coming into ministry since the 1990s have had something of a tradition to enter, but such a fledgling tradition for women barely counters two thousand years of patriarchal exclusion. In the face of such powerful disintegrating forces, what is it that enables feminist women in church leadership to stay together? One powerful element is the recognition of solidarity with other women and men, and a shared exploration of feminist scholarship and liturgy. As a young minister, I came across the writer Janet Morley (e.g. Morley 1989) and Women in Theology4 and began to live out a kind of second life alongside my ministry. I became involved in feminist liturgical development and feminist theology. The two lives were variously integrated and separated. There were exciting but dangerous fault lines: for example, running a traditional morning service before retiring to the vestry where we held the editorial meetings of Feminist Theology, knowing that each group would be scandalized by the other in that these two lives were separated but also integrated: each “me” had therefore to be kept separate but this came at a personal cost that I only discovered later. One of the great gifts of feminist scholarship over the last thirty years has been the rediscovery of the glorious company of women. We have woken up to the presence of women in Scripture and even to female images of God. Of course, in such an intensely patriarchal body of literature, these are barely ever more than glimpses, but, given the repressiveness of the forces seeking to exclude them, it is amazing that they are there at all. We now recognize (again—as women have from time to time throughout the history of the Church) that Jesus took an extraordinarily radical approach to the women he encountered and included among his disciples. And it is becoming clearer that, despite the Apostle Paul’s appeal to pagan family propriety, women played a leadership role in many of the first churches, even though this has been edited out in the formation of the written record, and the development of the canon. (See Thorpe 2007.) The great foremothers of second-wave feminist theology have developed thoroughgoing but also practical theologies of the Church. Rosemary Radford Ruether demonstrates her feminist scholarship in a life active in working for peace and justice. She has developed models of church life and leadership that challenge the patriarchal cultures under

Staying Together

129

which many women ministers labour. Her “women-church” is radical, lifegiving, and nurturing. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza describes ekklƝsia in the same terms. Both envisage communities of disciples, where liturgy is creative and affirming of women and men, and where discipleship is lived out in commitment to the marginalized, and to wholeness in society, in projects such as women’s refuges (Schussler Fiorenza 1998, 40-43; 1993; Radford Ruether 2002, 167-9). During the last thirty years, there have been similarly significant changes in the language of worship. I was a member of the editorial committee for the Methodist Hymn Book, Hymns & Psalms (1983), when it rather tentatively engaged with a group of feminist liturgists in an attempt to address issues of inclusive language. The issue was subject to a certain amount of ribaldry, but at least it was named. Now, at least in some settings, it is generally acknowledged that worshipping congregations are women as well as men, sisters as well as brothers; and in fewer settings, that God can be imaged in feminine as well as male terms. Creativity in worship is not confined to the activities of women but, as women have often inhabited liminal places, new informal ritual and liturgy has often originated in women’s gatherings, and women in church leadership have found themselves responding to pastoral needs with liturgical sensitivity. I hope that, as we build on the experience of so many women in church leadership, we will create a milieu in which women and men can thrive and overcome the forces of disintegration.

Conclusion: Integrating Humanity At the heart of feminist women’s experience of leadership in the overwhelmingly patriarchal institution that is the Church, there is a powerful set of disintegrating forces that make it very difficult to “stay together.” In finding means of integration, I believe we can create spaces for the flourishing not just of women, but for the whole of humankind. The final aim can never be to create exclusive space, which denies the reality of men’s experience, as men have denied that of women for millennia. I have tried to express the hope of wider integration in two hymns that I penned, which begin in female imagery but end in the wholeness and freedom of the whole human race. “Dear Mother God,” (Wootton 2007a, 16) written in 1988 at the beginning of the World Council of Churches Decade, ‘The Churches in Solidarity with Women,’ focuses on the image of God as a Mother Eagle in Deuteronomy 32:11 and proceeds to the promise of eagles’ wings in Isaiah 40:31. The hymn begins in the nest, with the mother bird brooding,

130

Chapter Nine

but ends with the chicks finding their own wings and learning to fly. The last verse expresses the hope that all may find this freedom: Let not our freedom scorn the needs of others; We climb the clouds, until our strong heart sings. May we enfold our sisters and our brothers, Till all are strong, till all have eagles’ wings.

The other hymn celebrates the experiences of Miriam, Mary Magdalene, and Constance Coltman (the first woman to be ordained in a Congregational Church in Britain, in 1917). Again, its last verse widens the celebration of women to encompass the whole human race: Made whole, the human race may answer to God’s call, in dance and silence, truth and grace, embracing all. This journey never ends, God’s promise calls us on, until our sisters, brothers, friends may join the song. (Wootton 2007a, 66)

What we long for, and what seems to be happening, is a wider integration. It is not just that fractured women are finding integration as they are embraced in a community that more fully includes women’s experience as well as men’s. To some extent, at least, the Church and the societies in which it is set are becoming more whole—though the Church appears to be being dragged kicking and screaming into a wholeness that wider society embraces, rather than offering a model of wholeness to society. There are now so many women in church leadership that they surely cannot return to the invisibility that I experienced in the 1980s. I begin to hope that this is now the start of a continuous and lasting wholeness, rather than the fragile, broken tradition that has flickered briefly into life so often before. But even as I write this, I am only too aware of the backlash: of the double power of the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical traditions, so inimical to the integration of women (in either sense); of the pernicious objectification of women that still allows them to be raped and beaten, bought and sold; of the inequity that permits a salary gap in wealthy societies and relegates women to the most desperate poverty in the twothirds world. Whatever progress we make, it is painful and halting, but I think, I think it is progress.

Staying Together

131

Bibliography Andersen, Elizabeth A. Mechthild of Magdeburg: Selections, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, pp. 13-14, cited in Wootton, 2010: 20, 2003. Argent, Alan. Elsie Chamberlain: The Independent Life of a Woman Minister. Sheffield: Equinox, 2013. Blohm, Uta. Religious Traditions and Personal Stories: Women Working as Priests, Ministers and Rabbis. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005. Coltman, Constance. “Post Reformation: The Free Churches,” in Royden 1924: 80-135, 1924. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, 1992. Feminist Theology, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press; London: Sage Publications, 1992. Gottfried of Disibodenberg and Theodoric of Echternach. The Life of the Saintly Hildegard, translated by Hugh Feiss. Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1996. Gyarmarthy-Amherd, Catherine. “The Ordination of Women in the Roman Catholic Church,” in Jones, Wootton and Thorpe 2008: 54-63, 2008. Hendry, Kathleen. Don’t Ask me Why? – Sixty Years a Woman Minister. London: URC, 1991. Hildegard of Bingen. Symphonia, with Introduction, Translations and Commentary by Barbara Newman (2nd ed.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/searchresources/guidetospecialcol lections/atoz/womenintheology/ Hymns & Psalms. London: Methodist Publishing House, 1983. Jones, Ian, Janet Wootton and Kirsty Thorpe. (2008) Women and Ordination in the Christian Churches: International Perspectives. London: T&T Clark, 2008. Kaye, Elaine, Janet Lees and Kirsty Thorpe. Daughters of Dissent. London: The United Reformed Church, 2004. Morley, Janet (ed.). Celebrating Women. London: Women in Theology and Movement for the Ordination of Women, 1989. Mwailu, Margaret. “Story” in Wootton 2007: 160-166, 2007. Petroff, Elizabeth. Consolation of the Blessed. New York: Alta Gaia Society, 1979.

132

Chapter Nine

Radford Ruether, Rosemary. Sexism and God-talk: Towards a Feminist Theology (2nd edn). London, SCM Press, 2002. Royden, Maude (ed.). The Church and Woman. London: James Clarke and Co., 1924. Schussler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation. London: SCM Press, 1993. —. Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context. Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1998. Taft, Zechariah. Biographical sketches of the lives and public ministry of various holy women whose eminent usefulness and successful labours in the Church of Christ, have entitled them to be enrolled among the great benefactors of mankind 1825, 1828. Now available in facsimile from Methodist Publishing House, Peterborough, 1992. Thorpe, Kirsty. “Women’s Ministry: A Developing Story,” in Wootton 2007: 30-49, 2007. Wootton, Janet (ed.). This is Our Story: Free Church Women’s Ministry. Peterborough: Epworth, 2007. —. Eagles’ Wings and Lesser Things. London: Stainer & Bell Ltd., 2007a. —. This is Our Song: Women’s Hymn-writing. London: Epworth, 2010. —. “A Gender-bender of a Life – so far.” Feminist Theology, May 2012, 20.3, 230-235, 2012. Wren, Brian. What Language Shall I Borrow? God-Talk in Worship: A Male Response to Feminist Theology. London: SCM, 1989.

Notes 1

Feminist Theology, (1992 - ), Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press; London: Sage Publications. 2 “Lord of the Dance”, (I danced in the morning) Sydney Carter (1915-2004); “The Family of Man” (I belong to a family) Karl Frederick Dallas (fl 1966). See also Brian Wren (1989); Wootton (2010: 170-180). 3 Symphonia no. 16. Translation by Janet Wootton. 4 See http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/searchresources/guidetospecialcollect ions/atoz/womenintheology/.

CHAPTER TEN FACING THE OUTSIDER WITHIN: INTERNATIONALITY, FEMINISM, AND AMERICAN CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION IVY GEORGE

Seemingly small and practical decisions can have decisive ramifications on one’s biography. My choice to accept a temporary post teaching sociology in a liberal arts program at a Christian college turned out to be a central decision in my life. I have held the position at the college for more than three decades. It has been a formative career for me. Upon my arrival, I basked in the novelty of the orientalist feminine mystique that was directed towards me as an Asian woman. I was an object of exotic intrigue and a curiosity for colleagues and students alike. My appearance, my Anglo-Indian speech and inflections, my biographic information and the accompanying cultural stereotypes around a woman from India as one who would have been subjected to an arranged marriage, my multi-lingual proficiencies, my being an inheritor of British colonial education, etc.— these were of interest, conversation, and even celebration at the institution. That I was contributing to the institutional needs to diversify their demographic was an asset. No doubt I doubled up as a person of colour who had no historical axe to grind with Americans, unlike other indigenous populations of colour who had become a nuisance on the social landscape of the US in the latter part of the twentieth century. That I was a female in a predominantly male institution also helped. I had to be protected as a rare and delicate specimen. Periodically, I would have a senior faculty member sidle alongside me to ensure that I was not experiencing any untoward racial discrimination. I would tell him that all was well, and indeed all seemed to be so.

134

Chapter Ten

The afterglow of my arrival was brief. The unspecified profile of my political, cultural, and theological positions came to light in short order and in sharp relief. It started to disturb the institutional calm in an otherwise hermetically sealed, politically and theologically conservative, male dominated, and primarily white institution. As I consider my career at the institution, there are two areas that I would like to reflect on: (1) my pedagogical commitments as a Christian sociologist, and (2) the challenges I face from the institution and students in carrying out these commitments. While sociology enables the description and analysis of society and its structures, it was my Christian faith that moved me to take up the project of social justice and transformation. I recognized that personal transformation rooted in a deep spirituality was integral to the larger structural revolution one hoped and prayed for. The recurring enactment of love and compassion towards others is a counter hegemonic activity and ultimately a revolutionary act. Faith in God pivots us back inevitably to acknowledging our limits and our need for love of self and others. A Christian educational institution was appealing to me because of my sense that any scheme based in a high minded modern ideology which proposed the overthrow of capitalism, patriarchy, or white supremacy was too shallow and simple minded. I had a high regard for human corruptibility and an even higher regard for the transforming love of God. I looked forward to working on some of these issues with young people in the classroom. My education in India was based on an authoritarian model where it was assumed that the teacher was the sole expert, and the student was obliged to respect the teacher’s instruction with little engagement in the direction of her learning. As I took to my role as faculty in my American classroom, I found myself being intuitively averse to adopting an autocratic mode of teaching. I found it uninspiring and politically regressive for the purposes of social transformation. I was familiar with the violence of silencing the voice, especially the female voice, and by extension other voices on the social margins. Human voice is fundamental to human agency. If indeed education is about the cultivation of critical consciousness, then pedagogy would have to be necessarily transgressive. Teaching sociology against the backdrop of the Christian faith was an enormous privilege, and it was important for the students to invest and own their education. I structured my classes by posing a series of questions pertaining to the subject slated for study and inviting joint discussions around the topic. Current events were never far from my reach, especially as these pertained to issues of social stratification,

Facing the Outsider Within

135

diversity, and inequality in the national and global spheres. I taught out of the conviction that the classroom was not removed from the world but rather an extension of it. Thus I attempted to get the students to locate their lives in the larger world and also to bring the world into their grasp. It is in this kind of circular travel that the most constructive learning takes place. However, as an international academic who became an American along the way, I found the pursuit of this critical educational project challenging because of my encounter with the institution’s cultural terrain. The college’s self-identification as evangelical and my own standing as one whose denominational affiliation was alien to US evangelicals caused some unease for the college and for me. I had little idea that our culturally rooted faith differences would have far reaching consequences for my teaching and scholarship as the years progressed. That human faith practices are embedded in human culture helped me understand my situation among evangelicals. A central belief in the salvific potential in the life and death of Jesus was what bound me to this institution but as I came to find out subsequently, even agreement about that was subject to different understandings. I was not able to assume very much. Implicit in the theo-political understandings of modern evangelicals was the thinking that Western culture—by virtue of being the progeny of Judeo-Christian anthropology—is inherently superior, and this unique history helped to explain the vast wealth of the West and its superior political and economic systems, and justified the missionary outlook of Western institutions towards the rest of the world. Based on the geopolitics of the time, the historical frames changed while the view remained the same. In the colonial era, the world outside the West was seen as heathen and savage, which thus enabled the carriage of the white man’s burden, or the mission civilisatrice. Towards the last quarter of the twentieth century, Cold War lenses were employed to approach the world as largely either communist or free. Thus, in my early days at the college in the mid-1980s I would have anti-communist pamphlets and booklets left in my office mailbox anonymously. Clearly more than a thinly veiled message to warn me to get in line as a teacher and scholar, these were meant to enlighten me on the vices and corruptions of communism and Marxism and the threats they posed to the cause of the Church and American freedom. This was also a time when discussions about greenhouse gases and global warming made the rounds among social scientists. One colleague suggested that global warming was a ruse put out by Eastern bloc communists to destroy the successes of the free market in the West. Moreover, this was the time when the influence of liberation theology, especially in the Central and Latin American Christian

136

Chapter Ten

communities, was having a transformative effect on Catholic theology. This too was quickly dubbed communist and instead, the focus was on the rise of Pentecostal, evangelical, and orthodox Roman Catholic theologies in these regions. From these experiences emerged my role as an international woman teaching sociology in the US; it was not without its challenges. Even at the outset of my career at the college, I noticed either an avoidance or a rejection of schools of thought that were organizing principles in the social sciences in the larger academic world. In the 1980s, anti-apartheid divestment protests on college campuses, and discussions about pluralism and multiculturalism in social philosophy, took centre stage. Social theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank held sway in International Development theories. Critical social theories informed studies in the social sciences and humanities and raised the consciousness of academic communities. The scaffolding of social power around the production of “truth(s)” came under examination. My employment of these theoretical lenses to understand and analyze social issues appeared to be a departure from the established orthodoxy of the academic canon at my institution. These conflicted with the prevailing Eurocentric neo-liberal doctrines in the studies of economics and politics, where the worldview was undergirded by doctrines of original sin, personal salvation, and redemption. My presentation of alternative theoretical positions was rendered suspect and shallow by college pundits who understood that the innovative and energizing spirit of the US market economy was Christendom’s supreme gift to the world at large and therefore sacrosanct. During the 1990s, almost as if overnight, evangelical educators started to react to postmodern thought and became exegetes of these theories. They criticized postmodern thought as undermining Christian apologetics about exclusive “Truth.” Ironically, it was as a Christian woman that I found some of these theoretical propositions life giving. Further, feminist theories that built on and criticized the earlier post-structuralists corresponded to and even affirmed my Christian faith through their acknowledgement of the innovative potential in dialectical thought. That is, there was a posture that assumes a willingness to allow the results of diverse experiences to be drawn into a synthesis for the next historical moment into our collective future. This position was premised on the feminist recognition of the partial view as the only authentic view and it then allowed for the validity of the view from the subjugated social margins. Given that the margins are also subject to critique, the feminist theoretical challenge remains as to how to view from below? Contrary to popular criticism, this feminist positioning would not allow an easy escape

Facing the Outsider Within

137

into relativism or a single totalizing vision (Haraway, 1991). As a Christian scholar, my understandings of human corruptibility, divine love, and forgiveness were of enormous assistance to the integration of feminism with faith. These opportunities for reflection and teaching moved me towards greater belief. My students found the ideas exhilarating as they sorted out questions of faith, freedom, and justice in light of the insights they gleaned from theory as these pertained to social wrongs and, most importantly, to their own complex biographies. Theory threw light on their life practices and their faith propositions stood as critique to theory. The intersection of theory and lived realities was a great place to be, and in it, the students and I found new life. Teaching and learning became a mutual and rewarding endeavour. Every silver lining, however, has a grey cloud. As time went on, a rising awareness of how I might have become a symbol of institutional “openness” and inclusiveness started to emerge. The sense that I was appointed possibly in lieu of a US minority began to take hold in my consciousness. As a “token” of the college’s global reach and presence, I straddled a “subject-object” status common to women, and other minorities who are employed in predominantly white and male institutions. In a way, my presence at the college enabled the maintenance of the status quo and provided the institution with ongoing legitimacy. My body embodied as an international female of colour supported the school’s mission to be inclusive and open to the world, even as the school retained its parochial worldview in the content of its educational program. In this sense I was an accidental appointment at the college. Nevertheless, I developed many spontaneous ties with students, staff, and faculty. Being the only woman and the sole faculty member of colour, students of colour displayed an elective affinity towards me. While I was glad to be available to them, I was also aware that I was at best a substitute for so many US minorities whose histories and experiences were different from my Indian post-colonial narrative. I felt the desperate paucity of adult mentors for these students. Still, I tried to make connections, build bridges, and cross them. I did not entirely enjoy the responsibility of my solo representation as a female, a faculty member of colour, and as a Christian rooted outside American evangelicalism. I started to notice that the earlier supports I had among colleagues were beginning to shift. While it was implicit and unspoken, I sensed that they approached me with a new selfconsciousness of social difference between us. I remained a disquieting presence. This played out on three fronts for me: as an international person of colour, as a woman, and as a person of a “wanderer-faith”.

138

Chapter Ten

As an international faculty who brings global issues to the classroom, I encounter some students who dismiss the topics as “too distant” for their interest. For those students who do take the discussions seriously, it is especially problematic if the analysis of global problems points to the involvement of the US and other Western political and economic institutions in explaining the origins and maintenance of these global issues. These discussions are particularly sensitive among students who see the US as a benevolent state actor in world affairs. As citizens keen to engage in international social justice, students are unsettled by the need to examine the nature of their self-representations of power as “Christian,” “white” or “American” and how these identities may be implicated in the reiteration of neo-colonial missionary activity. I sense that I am taking the risk of being the unwelcome messenger of bad news since much of the curricular material I introduce is new in terms of the students’ prior educational exposure. They bring a simplistic approach towards helping the poor, freeing the oppressed, transforming cultures, etc.; they arrive with the presuppositions that cultures outside the West are helpless, in danger, primitive, and will remain unreached by God without their personal assistance. I have noticed reluctance among students to study the history of social problems. They want answers and quick solutions in which they see themselves as agents of change. Many are drawn particularly to the plight of global women and children who are subject to physical torture, trafficking, mutilation, and death, but the need to understand these conditions as evolving in relation to societal changes domestically and internationally remains out of their comprehensive reach. Many are particularly resistant to making global connections in the anatomy of patriarchy. No doubt students’ prior convictions that sin and salvation are highly personal conditions, which are further rooted in American individualism, make it difficult to see webs of social good and evil in human culture and institutions. Students see such analysis as depressing and paralyzing. When I teach courses on social problems in the US, I run into other challenges. For some students, especially those who hail from middle- and lower-middle-class white populations, the discussions are either new or disturbing. They have generally not had to focus their studies on the nature of US stratification and social problems, and this has three potential effects for them. Students are happy to be introduced to new populations and analysis for the first time, or they are ambivalent about the focus on marginalized US populations they have not had to think about. They can dismiss these populations as superfluous and hence lying outside their attention. I also have students who hail from these marginalized

Facing the Outsider Within

139

populations who are invigorated by the affirmation of their experiences as Americans and who are eager for the analysis and the empowerment that comes from this education. In the early years when I taught introductory courses in sociology, I noticed an interesting twist in student reception to studying this discipline. Discussions of race in the US would be met with silence or generally low levels of participation, but when the following week I took up the discussion of the role of gender in US society, I would be met with enthusiastic and energizing discussion among women students. It was quite clear that when the students “owned” their learning, they were keen to participate. I would then advance the discussion by getting the students, especially the women in this instance, to see the dangers of adopting a uni-dimensional focus on male violence or patriarchy, which then exempts them from examining how they expend their own racial capital in violence against others—men and women of colour, poor white men, people with physical and mental challenges, nonWestern populations, those outside the church, etc. I would then introduce the students to the concepts of “racialized sexism” where the female body of colour is disembodied and objectified through the media; and I would expose them to the concept of “feminized racism” where white society feminizes the bodies of men and women of colour, seeing them as unfit, unreliable, incompetent, etc. It is at this stage in the courses that I am reminded of the intersectional space I occupy, carrying gender, race, faith, class, and internationality at all times. Since all these are situational identities, I can only appeal to some groups at any given time, but over the years, an increasing number of students are bringing their complex worlds into the classroom. They are bringing their sense of dissonance and connections with their faith and the worlds they know. Consequently, the class space becomes a junction for exchange of life and theory and learning. Students are given concrete understandings of what a transforming faith can look like in the context of their lived realities. I believe that a changed mind changes the world. As a teacher, I am aware that for several decades I have been one of few faculty members who have consistently taken up the responsibility of teaching about social injustice and inequality from a global and interdisciplinary perspective in all my courses. I have to work hard at placating and palliating students by my inclusive references to issues that clearly implicate some groups over others by virtue of social power differentials. Often I consent to refer to myself as also part of the “white” or “male” or “Western” majority for the purposes of solidarity with the larger group. This constant position of inclusiveness becomes an apology of sorts and is bound to lose its transformative potential. On the other

140

Chapter Ten

hand, I take this risk of extending the invitation for students to ponder the truths without making them feel isolated or singled out. In no small part, I do this to avoid my own isolation as a woman of colour in the classroom. I try hard to make my questions and discussions relevant for students’ lives and not leave them as abstractions from distant realities. As they come looking for hope and solutions, I move them to seek meaning through analysis of how social systems and histories work to shape social and individual reality. The notion that hope is not magical but earned is something that eludes their moral universe. Exposing my students to this idea remains a challenge. I run the risk of students studying social problems in a clinical fashion, where they absent themselves as subjects in the discussion, as if they stand removed from the phenomena or history. I trust them to make the links and convict themselves. One of the more painful aspects of evangelical theology that I notice among students is their thinking that oneness with God means that the particularities of the social self as gendered, racialized, sexualized, abled, and classed decline in significance. Identification with God requires an abandonment of self. The self is excised out and stands as a silhouette with no earthly substance. Love of self is refracted through the lens for the love of God. There is little sense that one brings one’s whole self with all her particularities and biographic details to enter into a covenant with God. Rather, it is a dual dynamic where one merges one’s identity with God, and subsequently and automatically one fuses laterally with the larger congregation of believers. All things are made good in this way. However, in so doing, one ceases to be one’s self. The students dismiss any attempt to point out the importance of social particularities or to demonstrate the role of social power as lacking in faith, as a conviction that disturbs the doctrinal peace and is therefore un-Christian. I am struck by the heavy toll paid by women who are subjected to such a theological approach. To begin with, they are women who have come in from a world of patriarchal norms that hail the importance of female subordination and subservience, where their voices have been stolen and their free selves have been thwarted. Several of my students have experienced sexual and/or racial violence, but these are unholy distractions and hence lie submerged in their consciousness. Evangelical culture for these women is no doubt crushing, but they remain in denial or rationalize their lot away. Watching the silencing of my female students under this cultural regime is particularly debilitating. In the end, I notice that the male students who espouse these ideas with great authority are also constrained from affirming the details of their lives and by extension that of others before God. Time and time again, I would witness the cooptation of individuals

Facing the Outsider Within

141

to disembody their selves or the slow silencing of those who want to find their own voices. I see this as a powerful means of repression through religious ideology. Unity in Christ also serves as a means of deactivating human agency for resistance and justice because Jesus “paid it all” and therefore there is no need for humans to engage critically with the world. I cannot underscore adequately the extraordinary challenge this ideology poses for me as I try to address the idea that the principles of faith are enlivening only when applied to the lived realities of humans and other life forms in the midst of our finitude. As a Christian scholar I am guided by the call of the prophetic and transformative potential in the gospels of the New Testament. I am indebted to the enormous contributions made by social theorists to describe and evaluate the social aspects of the human condition. I understand that the theoretical tools provided to us by cultural critics call for the redemption of societies through de-centring dominant models of power, especially through the de-masculinization and de-racination of individuals and institutions. An example of this endeavour is when I get my students to ponder the definition of “human” from the standpoint of Martha Nussbaum’s theory on human capabilities (Nussbaum, 2000). The theory is elegant in its simplicity. Nussbaum shows how “human being” is fundamentally a relational identity placing the individual within community/ies. She suggests a detailed threshold to measure the state of human flourishing, leading students to ponder what it is like to live a less than human life. Students are entranced by the magical ways in which this understanding gives new legs to their prior understandings, and how this compels them towards comprehending social diversity in a fresh way. Social theory aids the Christian’s pilgrimage towards transformation and wholeness in individuals and societies in radical ways. No doubt amalgamating the two remains a weighty and challenging exercise, personally and professionally. Teaching in the midst of these cross-currents becomes a purposeful and exciting experience for me. It is a transformative practice. Increasingly, my challenges are with the larger institutional community which appears to remain in a time warp with its a priori understandings of what Christian education should look like. Rather than see the institution’s opportunities in the multiple intersectional assets I carry, I am viewed as a threat that needs to be domesticated. I am cast as “other” due to my international origins and all the attendant material accoutrements that come with this perception. (For years I was the only minority faculty member at the college.) My status as “other” is further re-inscribed while teaching sociology, a discipline that holds no subject so sacrosanct that it is exempt

142

Chapter Ten

from the light of examination. Within the college, I am the convenient subject who absorbs the institution’s fears and anxieties among its men and women. At the outer edges of my marginal experience at the college is the charged question of loyalty that is constantly placed on me. In my work, I am seen as “undoing citizenship and faith.” I am disembodied and sectioned off as being ideological, anti-male, anti-rich, anti-white, or anticapitalist. Over the years, I have had to deal with criticisms and aspersions on my non-evangelical Christianity—a more serious breach than any other transgression in the community. The thinking goes like this: “If you are a Christian how can you question […] evangelism to the unreached, the Biblical authority of men over women, the superiority of Western culture and its structures, the normativity of the market economy, etc?” In such displays of institutional culture, I sense a deep vein of provincial antiintellectualism and inhospitality to the diversity of ideas and worldviews. Students who study with me also bear the brunt of legitimizing their studies and are seen as de-legitimizing the teaching of other faculty. My students are perceived as naïve and biddable because of my “passionate” and persuasive powers. In this process, the entire platform of my pedagogy and teaching content can be easily dismantled along with the dismissal of the seriousness of my students. When much of my teaching is seen as “ideology,” the moral and substantive aspects of my investment in education are rendered irrelevant. My status as woman faculty further complicated life for the largely male institution and me in my early years. Throughout, in conversations and evaluations I have been referred to as “strong and opinionated” or “strident” with my ideas and positions. No doubt, the optics of racial and cultural differences fuel the institution’s defence of its prejudices. Objectification of the other as racialized, female, “un-American,” or “liberal” is economical, as one does not need to deal with the complexities of the other’s multidimensionality. At other times, I am distanced for my “moral rhetoric.” With such references I am reduced to becoming a “female” whose essence is to be weak, subdued, and passive. A female of colour in a white majority institution who does not stay in her subaltern and subordinate place is a threat. I had no allies among the few women I worked with over the years because they also hailed from this closed cultural system that socialized them in their lack of confidence and fears of the world. They operate to this day with a survivor complex, as if their rightful place should be in the kitchen and therefore sense themselves as guests or imposters in the male arena they now find themselves in. I sense resistance and even an incapacity to picture the anatomy of historic

Facing the Outsider Within

143

patriarchy, and of evangelical patriarchy in particular, among these women. Instead, they either ignore the saliency of gender in social reality or, in the case of a few, have spent their careers trying to repatriate women into the Bible in order to recover their own lost selves. For these women, talk of women’s leadership does not go beyond the slotting of women into male positions of power to re-enact male behaviours. They have little sense that they would have to make a dramatic difference of overhauling or even dismantling the institution in their slouch towards inclusiveness on masculine terms. Afraid of conflict and confrontation, they turn into the best handmaidens in this system of patronage. With the residual possession of their racial capital, the women move closer to their men and away from me. They are grateful for the class and status privileges they acquire through their association with academic institutions. I understand. After all, they spent their lives building the capital needed to secure their status at the institution. They would be at risk by virtue of their association or solidarity with a faculty member like me who espouses differing worldviews that depart from the traditional orthodoxies. The feminists among them did not seem able to deploy the lens of inter-sectionality to extend themselves beyond “women’s issues” in their political purview. Theirs is a feminism that does not call for self-critique. They do not grapple with the need to dislodge the masculine centre in their institutions and culture. They are oblivious to the need for their own masculinization in order to succeed among men. Many decades of teaching and studying with wonderful students drove me to depths and heights that I might not have been pushed to in some other institution. The tight-knit religious ideology of the college moved me to the renewal of a more dynamic faith. The heart of the gospel message is essentially disruptive: that the Divine breaks through in uncommon ways and that Divine love births Divine anger, a form of lament. The Old Norse word angr, which means “a lament for lost possibilities,” is the root for the English word “anger.” God’s desire for the healing of a broken beauty is the basis for God’s love. Faith in God requires a willingness to risk one’s confidences to cooperate with the Divine endeavour to enact Divine Love. Doubt, critique, error, a change of mind are some of the many companions on this journey towards redemption. An absence of imagination is an obstacle to the practice of faith, and faith-based institutions are particularly vulnerable. In my latter years at the college, I have had to consider the improbability of keeping the prophetic and hospitable core of the gospel alive. In educational or other enterprises they are embedded in historic systems and structures that are far more beholden to their viability today as small business enterprises or corporations in a sea of atomized,

144

Chapter Ten

competitive, bureaucratic, and stratified, market-oriented institutions. This is in no small part due to how the prophetic aspects of faith have been coopted by American history. In time, I would develop a more sympathetic understanding of my host community whose faith tradition I came to see as being rooted in a peculiarly American nativism. In contrast, I could see how my movements towards faith stemmed from my life as a peripatetic, from my wanderings and wonderings, and therein lay the tensions. By virtue of my migratory self, I embraced a wanderer-faith that requires a willingness to redraw prior cartographies. The horizon shifts interminably. A nebulous trust is the only map at hand. The stranger is a constant arrival on this road. Debt, gratitude, trust, and an abandonment of fear are central to the faith of the wanderer. Quite naturally I found in myself a flexible and mobile commitment to a radical inclusiveness of all those subaltern groups—the physically and mentally challenged, the poor, women, religious others, and sexual minorities—as I sojourned. I know that they too fall into the Divine embrace. A nativist faith seeks comfort in Divine might and power; it is a faith based on fear and is driven to exert control of self and others in order to appease God. It is a parochial faith that lives by sureties and certainties derived from literal interpretations of the Christian Scripture. Fundamentally, this fear-based theology rests in a God who is perceived as vengeful and unforgiving, a God who extracts guilt and shame from his devotees, a God who calls his people to withdraw from the rest of his creation in order to preserve their “purity.” A clean and simple dualism ensues where the world is divided into good and evil, Christian and secular, sinful and saved. Even the glorious Christian doctrine of grace is manipulated by this fear as it makes the dispensation of Divine grace conditional on human behaviour. This nativism in American evangelical theology stems in part from the anxieties of the early settlers who erected a narrative based on the following: election by God for their intrepid experiment to create the world anew in the New World; persecution from the Mexicans and the native “savages” and the natural threats at the frontier; and blessing through material abundance never before achieved on earth (Powers, 2014). My readings by women as disparate as Alice Munro, the Nobel literary prize winner (Munro, 1997), and eco-feminist philosopher Vandana Shiva (Shiva, 1989) showed me how to decipher a predominantly white, individualistic, and muscular heterosexist theology that runs right through the cultural DNA of the evangelical Christian’s profile. It is an inherently anthropocentric theology that allows little room for respect and care of any life outside a highly circumscribed group of

Facing the Outsider Within

145

humans. Men needed a God with spine to reassure them of the rightness of their path and strategies to overcome the “other.” Triumph and persecution are recurring motifs in this story as it is passed from one generation to the next. Paradoxically, the college became the crucible in which my religious faith found an opportunity to refine itself. I stuck it out. Years earlier, I took the advice of a mentor who suggested that perseverance, longevity, and care are essential for long term impact in an institution. I stayed. Always, my sense of the larger world I came from and ultimately belonged to was my solace. I resisted and survived the institution’s efforts to marginalize me. I took every chance to teach overseas or in other local institutions that enabled me to maintain a reasonable perspective. I have enjoyed the pursuit of scholarship that has enabled me to contribute to human transformation. I persist in staying because I know that the direction of social change in contemporary US society will be more hospitable to heterogeneity than homogeneity, even though traditional institutional positions remain entrenched for the duration.

Bibliography Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Munro, A. Selected Stories. Vintage International, New York, 1997. Nussbaum, M. Women and Human Development. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Powers, T. “Texas: The Southern Baptists in Power,” reviews Wuthnow, R (2014) Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State (Princeton University Press) in “The New York Review of Books,” October 9, 2014, pp.29-31. Shiva, V. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. Zed Books, 1989.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jeff Bolster is the Dean of Students and Director of Residential Life at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. His current research analyzes how undergraduate students map out and make sense of their own developmental experiences during the college and university years. Alethea Cook is completing her graduate degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia (Canada), where she also worked as research assistant in Interpretation, Religion and Culture. Her SSHRC-funded research focuses on the conceptualization of maternal figures in the literature and culture of Britain (1700-1900). Robert Doede is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity Western University, in Langley, British Columbia (Canada), where he is also a Co-Director of the University’s Gender Studies Institute. He has published articles on philosophy of mind in various philosophical journals. Ivy George is Professor of Sociology at Gordon College, north of Boston, Massachusetts. Her areas of research and publications are in International Development and Diversity Studies in US populations. She has completed a joint study with Janie Victoria Ward (Simmons College, Boston) entitled “More Than Kin: White Mothers of Chinese Daughters” and is presently engaged in research on masculinity and physical or mental challenges. Allyson Jule is Professor of Education and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia (Canada) and has published widely on gender and education. She is the author of A Beginner’s Guide to Language and Gender and Gender, Participation and Silence in the Language Classroom: Shshushing the Girls (2003), and has edited or co-edited several other books, including Being Feminist, Being Christian with Bettina Tate Pedersen (2006).

148

Contributors

Rebecca Laird is Associate Professor of Christian Ministry and Practice at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. She is coeditor of Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Formation, and Discernment, three recent volumes of the work of Henri Nouwen. She researches, writes, and teaches on the early women preachers of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition in the United States. Holly Faith Nelson is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia (Canada) and has published widely on gender and spirituality in European literature (1400-1700). She recently co-edited French Women Authors: The Significance of the Spiritual, 1400-2000 (2013). She has also appeared on television and in film as an academic expert on gender. Priscilla Pope-Levison holds faculty appointments as Professor of Theology and Assistant Director of Women’s Studies at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington and Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She recently completed her sixth book, Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era (New York University Press, 2014). Bettina Tate Pedersen is Professor of Literature at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. She is co-author and editor, with Allyson Jule, of Being Feminist, Being Christian (2006) and has published essays on British and Canadian women writers, feminism, and teaching. She is currently working on a book, Why Feminism Still Matters. Kendra Weddle Irons teaches Religion at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas. She also blogs with Dr. Melanie Springer Mock at Ain’t I a Woman (http://aintiawomanblog.net/) and their book, Meant to Be with Chalice Press, will be released in April 2015. Janet Wootton is Director of Studies for the Congregational Federation in the UK. Following nearly twenty-five years in pastoral ministry, she took on her current role, running training courses for a variety of ministries. She is a writer, hymn writer, and speaker on feminism, worship, and mission. She co-edits Feminist Theology, Worship Live, and The International Congregational Journal.