I loved the first cover of my first novel. Partly because, 11 years ago, it communicated to the reader: this isn’t going to be your typical Christian fiction. I didn’t want to bait and switch.
I knew it hit the mark when I participated in a Christian fair at a community park. I set up a bookseller’s table with a few of my writer friends. An angry, sweaty-faced man stormed up with his pubescent daughter, picked up my book and started yelling at her with an extended finger. “You asked what the pastor meant by immodest! This is immodest. This is… alluring!”
He went on to belittle her for men’s lust. Then he turned and leveled his disgusted gaze towards me. He would not hand me the book, but dropped it on the table with a derisive smirk (he showed me!) and marched her away in tears. She turned ashamed eyes back toward me for a moment, so apologetic for her crime of being a girl.
Drink more water or it’s your fault
In my youth, I heard water neutralizes an acid stomach. And on the flip side, sometimes pain in your stomach meant not enough acid. Which, of course, water also helps. I think there was a thread of “pain is a construct of your mind” philosophy also woven into that. The point was: you never actually needed antacids. You just needed to drink more water. Pain was probably your fault.
When I finally broke down and bought Tums, I still felt guilt that I had eaten the wrong things. Eaten too fast. I hadn’t had enough water.
We create these rules in our minds as a sort of safekeeping. To throw out to the universe, “That would never happen to me!” and “Look, see, how I have protected myself. I followed a rule!” When others suffer, we blame. You must not have followed a rule. It’s your fault.
It’s either my fault or your fault
Every time I hear a man say that he wishes women would be sensitive and “put a little more clothing on.” I die a little inside. But… only if he’s a believer.
What he’s saying is, “It’s the women you gave us, Lord!” He is trying to make someone else responsible, so his external situations can allow him to believe that he has relinquished his inner life over to God.
Cultural modesty does not prevent rape, so what do you mean by covered up?
I laughed a little when my uncle first told me he was “a conservative Christian.” In my mind, I thought, dude, you’re from California. You don’t know what conservative is. You let your wife wear pants. (I realize now this is a political alignment, and not an expression of faith.)
Should a woman hide her shoulders so LDS men know she’s wearing garments, sealed in the temple to someone else?
Can a woman show that she has two legs like a man? I loved the exchange in the novel, The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. The missionary tried to get the African women to cover their naked breasts according to his cultural sensitivity (quite an inconvenience to nursing and working at the same time) while his wife wore pants and the men of the village couldn’t look her in the eye. They appropriately bounced their gaze away.
If you’re in certain parts of the world, maybe she needs to cover her hair. Or become as pious as a Hasidic Jew, shave her hair and wear a wig, so no one accidentally views the immodest glory of her natural hair. Surely that will make it easier for men to praise God for their maleness.
I’ve likely written before that in the autobiography Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how the need to hide and sequester her womanhood never ended—only escalated—in her submission. Even fully hidden from view with a veil obscuring her face, men’s lust arose from the sound of her walking. The echo of her womanly shoes tapping down the hall brought up images of shapely legs, so her equally pious male friend asked her to wear soft-soled shoes.
‘Ezer a guy out, all you fine helper people. It’s really hard not to sin.
There’s nothing a helper can do to make it easier for him to turn his heart, mind, and soul over to God. Not even drinking more water.
I don’t care about outside the church or the unbelieving culture at large. It only bothers me in the body. And it seems more prevalent to me the more that roles and gender are segregated in the church.
I used to not care so much about equality or women who preached because I do not desire to pastor. My hot button was abuse due to those roles. But I’m to the point that whenever I hear the term “male leadership” or “husbands, lead your wife,” I cringe because none are free when power discrepancy is justified scripturally.
The more the man views himself as set apart, and the more gender-based responsibility he assumes… the more she is lowered from a divine image bearer to his object. Possibly a treasured object under his loving care to whom he will wash the feet of, and give his life up for, yes—but an object of his, nonetheless.
And I don’t think Jesus’s intent when he said “when you look at a woman with lust you have already sinned” means a man should remove her from his line of sight instead of submitting his heart. I mean, he should both submit to God and submit to women out of reverence to Christ.
If you’re afraid you’re going to pinch the tush of every female you see in the memory care facility during your senility—then view all women as your sister/daughters now, in the secret places of your reasoning. I heard a pastor once say that if you put a muzzle on a mean dog, you still have a mean dog. And I think during old age, we lose some muzzles of society. Hiding less of my sarcastic thoughts now that I’m fifty is a perfect example.
Neither should he keep women from the inner sanctum/lair because of the reminder that her sex difference is a portable temptation to him. Soft-soled shoes won’t remove lust just because she is neither seen nor heard. I wonder if, like objectification, the segregation of gender roles, and the ardent belief that men and women cannot be friends (because her organs dictate her one role) actually exasperates lust.
I know that belief contributes to the deep pain of the childless in the church. She is your friend, too. I have some close friends that might argue this point with me. But I think unpracticed interaction and segregation breeds, “She smiled at me. That means she probably wants to have sex with me,” as much as it reveals how the core belief of inequality spreads its tentacles into all interactions. Approaching an unavailable woman shows your belief that females have one function for you.
Sister, there is no way to prevent someone else from sinning against you. And if men will not see women as equal standing in the body of Christ, segregating or deferring to the gender at large will not change it. Differences are needed in community.
How to change it? Step up.
I believe using your gifting, according to your faith, and in whatever space will allow you, will move things. When we arrived in Israel for our tour, our Southern Baptist pastor raised his eyebrows at me and said “The tour guide is a woman?! Uh oh. We’ll see how this goes…” I was so annoyed that I, out of the whole group, was the one to whom he showed his prejudice.
Her people had escaped the Spanish inquisition. She was a born-again Jewess, living in the holy land and her family had practiced Jewish traditions and rituals her whole life. She had intimate knowledge of things like the Passover supper and which coins were exchanged in the first century temple. She spoke three languages. But she had this one thing against her—a uterus. At the end of the tour, our pastor asked his “heavy hitters” to kick in a little more money. He wanted to pay her extra because of her unanticipated value: she didn’t hold back her teaching.
As we’re being conformed to the image of Christ, we should not should stop trying to renew our minds or move toward the new kingdom. The kingdom where both men and women are now the priests of God, fully endowed with all the gifts of the spirit to shine light, regardless of our unique organs related to procreation.
And (this is only for the men who lead through gender instead of spirit-gifting) when you think of yourself as the head of everything—realize how often you ask her to step in for you. How you create a paradigm where you declare you are the leader, but are not empowered through gender alone, so you blame the girls.
Give your husband sex and then he’ll be faithful to you.
Take care of your body and then he’ll be attracted to you.
Dress modestly, then he will see you as a sister.
Submit first, then he will love you.
If you follow him, then he will lead.
I don’t think this is a problem for humans who weren’t raised in the church. I don’t think it’s an issue for girls who weren’t told, “Men only want one thing from you. Girls have (only) one precious gift. One thing of value.”
And I also don’t believe it’s a problem for men who view women as equal.
Back ordered and out-of-print Christianity
Movements sell books. I think much of the purity movement was people who rejected the sexual freedom of their youth. They over-corrected, and wanted a rule to corral suffering this side of heaven—to blame pain and dysfunction on something that could be controlled. Drink more water and it won’t be your fault! Or, they wanted absolution: I didn’t know the rule—so it wasn’t my fault. They wanted to redeem their virginity through their children and so promised them a false god, a sexual prosperity that they had no intimate knowledge of.
How we long for simple, descriptive, reproducible formulas! Tweetable existentialism. A theology with a man’s name on it.
I used to dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses because (to my understanding) they weren’t allowed to read the Bible unless they viewed it through the lens of the Watchtower’s interpretation and accompanying literature. At least they are honest in their gatekeeping.
Now, I realize it’s the same in our churchyard. So much of what we peddle for book sales is a tangent to the gospel; slapping a man’s last name on our affiliation and pledging allegiance to it. We search for commentaries that explain what we want to believe. Or we sit under people who write commentaries that prove what we want to believe. One human cannot accurately contain all the deep mysteries of God—we were designed for community. So even if it that doctrine has sustained a couple hundred years, parts of it will be wind and its followers the reeds.
Making the straight and narrow, straighter and narrower since 1845
The Southern Baptist faction began for segregation. Churches were allowing non-whites in their congregations and they wanted to keep the truer faith of the good ol’ days. I was raised in the faith and given a hearty fear of liberal sects like the American Baptists. Now, as an adult, I’m becoming increasingly averse to historical denominations, dogma containing surnames, and movements. No matter how new, no matter how old. The dividing walls are not just gender, but a more systemic problem of gatekeeping and control of the money machine.
The other morning I read a blog by a woman who wrote a disclaimer that she was, after all, still Eve‘s daughter. She was diminishing God’s ability to speak truth through her since she believed all women were fundamentally more likely to be deceived. The theology she puts her faith in sells a lot of books and has for centuries. It was like saying, “I wish I could ask a man about this—since I can’t trust my lady-brain. Unfortunately, every time I try to, he thinks I want to sleep with him.”
The real upset is when laypeople and uneducated start digging. Even worse, armchair theologians like me reading the Bible and trying to parse out truth. As my dad reminded me, “Well, anyone can put up a blog.”
William Tyndale was executed because he translated directly from Greek and Hebrew instead of the church-authorized Latin Vulgate. The original texts undermined key doctrines of The Church. Plus, he translated into the English common tongue. The educated couldn’t fathom someone as a lowly as a plow-hand understanding holy scripture.
If no one is making money off it—is it really a valid doctrine?
Back when I thought I was called to be a missionary, I came across a lovely little book by Amy Carmichael, called Mimosa. It is the story of a young girl who hears the simplest of gospel messages one afternoon and receives it. The family could only send one child to the missionary school, so she returned home.
She grows up, becomes a wife and a mother and spends her life in a village far away from any Christians, the Bible, or Christian culture. She’s reunited to the writer decades later—only to find that with this tiny seed of God’s love for her, she’d lived a life convicted of, and in obedience to, many biblical concepts that directly opposed the culture of India where she made her home. Simple things like, it didn’t honor the God who loved her to go into debt she couldn’t repay. And big things, like trust in the Almighty for an empty belly.
I wonder about all the time I spend pondering women’s roles in the American church, when so many in the world don’t have access to “drink more water.” I’m sure we give too much effort talking about concepts, and laminating membership cards to Apollos or Paul, when, if we were just moving around outside in the world—the Holy Spirit would tell us how to take the next step.
But on the flip side, as we watch the exodus of believers who leave wounded and disillusioned from faith spaces, maybe it’s time for more armchair theologians to examine the dogma of our tradition.
And here is where it lands so heavy on me. No one questions your gifting when you are ministering outside the churchyard. The only place any of this applies is inside the building with a logo and a security team, where you can buy their books.
